FinePower RL‑4 ring lamp review

I often take pho­tos of dif­fer­ent devices and there­fore at some point I decid­ed to pur­chase a ring lamp. As you may have guessed, my choice fell on a mod­el called RL‑4 from FinePow­er, about which this review will be. I will try to tell you about all the short­com­ings of this ring lamp. But, look­ing ahead, I’ll say that in all the pho­tographs in the arti­cle, only this lamp was the source of light (light­ing).

Characteristics

Complete set

The ring comes in a fair­ly large card­board box. On the front side there is an image of the lamp itself, the com­pa­ny logo and a list of the fea­tures of this mod­el.

On the back of the pack­age are the main tech­ni­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics of the device. There is no inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion on the sides of the box, so we will not linger here.

Let me remind you that I only use this lamp as light­ing. But in order to demon­strate the com­plete set, it still had to be dis­as­sem­bled.

Inside the box:

• lamp;
• hold­er for mobile device;
• mov­able fix­ture;
• tri­pod;
• pow­er cord (non-remov­able);

Appearance

I’ll prob­a­bly start with the most obvi­ous, which is that the RL‑4 only comes in one col­or: black. Its diam­e­ter is 26 cen­time­ters. On the reverse side, it has spe­cial ven­ti­la­tion holes, since the diodes heat up quite well dur­ing oper­a­tion.

There are two threads on the out­side and on the inside, one of which is used to install the smart­phone hold­er, and the oth­er to install the ring itself on a tri­pod.

The pow­er cable is quite long — a lit­tle more than 2 meters. At the end of the cable is a USB plug, which I usu­al­ly con­nect to a com­put­er. But, the lamp can also be pow­ered by a portable charg­er. The con­trol pan­el is locat­ed on the wire itself and there is an indi­ca­tor on it that informs us about the lamp being con­nect­ed to the pow­er sup­ply. But, if you turn on the lamp dur­ing pow­er, the indi­ca­tor goes out.

Demon­strat­ing the max­i­mum tri­pod length was not an easy task, but I think I at least man­aged to do it. The blan­ket is about 2 meters long, so the tri­pod can extend about the same dis­tance.

Operating experience

The remote con­trol has a mode switch, an on / off but­ton, one LED and two bright­ness con­trols. The lamp is able to burn with warm, cold and nat­ur­al light (nat­ur­al is light between warm and cold).

In the fol­low­ing pho­tos I will demon­strate how the lamp works at max­i­mum bright­ness as a sin­gle light source in all three modes. But before that, I’ll show you how it looks (I for­got to turn off the usu­al lamps in the room).

And now with light­ing. In the first pho­to — cold, in the sec­ond — warm, in the third — nat­ur­al.

I main­ly take pho­tos using cold light. Let’s now demon­strate nat­ur­al light at min­i­mum and max­i­mum bright­ness:

In the fol­low­ing pho­tos I will demon­strate the work of a cold col­or for each lev­el of light bright­ness. If there are 10 of them (bright­ness steps).

Thanks to this design, the lamp can be rotat­ed and direct­ed under a cer­tain tra­jec­to­ry. Oth­er­wise, a phone hold­er will help you get an even bet­ter angle.

What I didn’t like here is that some­times the ring is sup­pos­ed­ly attached to the end, but in fact it hap­pens that it can’t even hold the phone. And some­times it hap­pens the oth­er way around, it is tight­ly fixed and eas­i­ly holds the smart­phone.

In the reviews, I saw some peo­ple com­plain that: “the ball head with the tilt adjust­ment screw does not hold the spec­i­fied tilt of the ring lamp.” And to be hon­est, after acquir­ing this very lamp, I also had such a prob­lem, but after sit­ting for a while I fig­ured it out and real­ized that I need­ed to fix it in a spe­cial way.

I also used this lamp for video and there­fore I can say that it helps me a lot. We fixed the phone on the hold­er and start­ed shoot­ing.

Conclusion

Sum­ming up, I want to say that I was sat­is­fied with this lamp, as it allows you to eas­i­ly take beau­ti­ful (as it seems to me) pho­tos both at night and dur­ing the day. For the entire peri­od of oper­a­tion (~ 3 months), there were no com­plaints in terms of light modes and bright­ness adjust­ment. If you need a lamp for pho­tos of devices, then I think this option is suit­able. For shoot­ing video (when a per­son shoots only his hands and equip­ment) — it’s also good. The only thing I did not like was the flim­sy design in it, which I would rate 3 out of 5.

I hope you enjoyed this review and made your own con­clu­sion. Oth­er reviews on dif­fer­ent equip­ment, you can find just below in the sec­tion “About the author”. Thank you for your atten­tion!