Stop saying Watt as if it’s the brightness of the light, Watt is just the power draw of the lights, two lights with same wattage can have a totally different level of brightness output. So why are so many lights often labeled or include the wattage as a model name?
Well this mainly has to do with the electricity and often when using a lot of strong lights with also a strong power draw, you have to be careful not blow a fuse by drawing too much wattage. So knowing how much wattage the lights are you can easily calculate them together to for example not exceed 2000watt in one group in a building or in a house.
What does stand for the brightness of the light is either Lux at 1 meter or lumens, which I have noticed not a lot of Youtubers refer to the brightness of light with and often uses odd methods to show how bright a light actually is, without using an international standard.
The reason to use Lux is that it is an international standard unit to measure brightness, but also when you really start comparing the Lux of different lights with the same wattages, you will find out that a lot of them don’t output the same level of brightness.
For example the Rollei or Colbor W100 vs the Zhiyun Molus X100, both are 100 watt lights, but the amount of light coming out of both of them are very different.
Rollei W100 peak brightness is 7400 Lux at 1 meter, while the Zhiyun Molus X100 peak brightness is at about 17.000 Lux at 1 meter, which is clearly more than just double its brightness, while both lights draw about the same amount of power.
While a traditional 800 Watt Redhead you might think is going to be way brighter than 60 watt light. A 800 watt Redhead gives you about 21.000 Lux at 1 meter, but my Nanlite forza 60 with a spotlight attachment gets about 30.000 lux at 1 meter, while drawing far less power.
And also to understand the Lux value a bit better, there is an illuminance list which you can refer to to find out how bright of a light you likely need.
Bright Sunny day its 32.000-100.000 Lux
In the shade with clear blue sky 10.000 – 25.000 Lux
Overcast is 1000-2000 Lux
Office lighting 300-500 Lux
You either want to match the Lux numbers or if you want to over power the lights you need a light with a much higher Lux output.
One issue I have with Lux is that the values get quite large making it less easy to remember and also a mouth full to say numbers that are above 10.000 lux.
There is a Foot-Candle unit which has a smaller value, however it isn’t an international standard of measuring unit, so that is why I don’t think this is a proper way to show the brightness of a light. A measuring unit that is an international Standard is KLX which stands for Kilolux.
And 1 unit of Kilolux is a 1000 Lux, which should make things a lot easier to understand with smaller numbers.
For example the Zhiyun Molus X100 is 16.985 lux and saying that it’s quite a hassle with too many numbers, while just saying 17 kilolux is a lot easier.
Also adjusting the illuminance list with smaller numbers makes it easier to understand.
Bright Sunny day its 32 – 100 Kilolux
In the shade with clear blue sky 10 – 25 kilolux
Overcast is 1-2 Kilolux
Office lighting 0.3-0.5 Kilolux
So in the future when I review lights I will be using Kilolux instead of using just Lux.
Hope lighting companies also would look at this and also enable them to show the brightness of their lights using KLX for Kilolux, with much smaller numbers that are far easier to remember and also they don’t need to type in large numbers to display on their website.
If you agree or disagree leave a comment below.
