Overview of the ring lamp Ritmix RRL-091

Soft dif­fused light works well for sub­ject pho­tog­ra­phy with­out shad­ows. Many peo­ple aim their flash at the ceil­ing for this pur­pose, oth­ers take pic­tures in a light­box, but all this requires skills and the right equip­ment. Ring lamps are one of the eas­i­est and cheap­est ways to solve this prob­lem.

I have been writ­ing reviews about prod­ucts from online stores since 2015 and all these years I have been pho­tograph­ing with a smart­phone in day­light. That is, in the shade in bright sun­light. But the weath­er is extreme­ly change­able: some­times the sun is not vis­i­ble for weeks, and at the begin­ning of sum­mer it does not look at the win­dows at all. And with­out nor­mal light, good pho­tos will not work. To cus­tomers, such excus­es may seem extreme­ly uncon­vinc­ing (((

It would be nice to have an arti­fi­cial light source for pho­tos in cloudy weath­er, as well as in the evening.

By the way, absolute­ly all the pho­tos in the review were tak­en by an old Xiao­mi Mi 5 smart­phone. That is, the cam­era was the same, but the light­ing was dif­fer­ent.

The Rit­mix RRL-091 lamp arrived in a slight­ly wrin­kled card­board box. Tra­di­tion­al­ly, all the com­pet­i­tive advan­tages of the prod­uct are indi­cat­ed on the box.

This is what the lamp looks like: a pow­er­ful met­al clothes­pin with two flex­i­ble legs and a wire with a con­trol pan­el.

Sep­a­rate­ly in the box was a plas­tic hold­er for a smart­phone. Sponges can be moved apart from 58 to 87 mm. Enough to hold most smart­phone mod­els.

The hold­er is fixed on the met­al ball of the flex­i­ble leg with a plas­tic clamp nut.

The lamp itself is made of high qual­i­ty: the body is met­al, noth­ing dan­gles and does not play. Exter­nal diam­e­ter 89 mm, inter­nal diam­e­ter 49 mm. Thick­ness 14 mm.

In poor out­door light­ing, the dif­fuser of the lamp seems to be illu­mi­nat­ed. Most like­ly, there is a reflec­tive sub­strate inside.

And here is the met­al ball on the sec­ond flex­i­ble leg. Ball diam­e­ter 17.5 mm. It sticks to the base very well.

The met­al clothes­pin of the base is made to last. Flex­i­ble legs are screwed to it with large met­al nuts. Thus, the entire design of the lamp is made with a good mar­gin of safe­ty and looks very durable.

The length of the pow­er cable is 127 cm. The body of the remote con­trol is plas­tic. After turn­ing on, the pow­er but­ton is illu­mi­nat­ed with a blue LED. Man­age­ment is intu­itive. Plus and minus bright­ness adjust­ment. A total of 9 bright­ness lev­els are avail­able. Arrow but­ton — change col­or tem­per­a­ture.

USB pow­er increas­es ease of use: you can not depend on sock­ets, but for exam­ple, con­nect a lamp to a pow­er bank.

Well, let’s start test­ing. I chose a seem­ing­ly not the most capri­cious item — Leno­vo wire­less head­phones, dark gray, mat­te.

Test shot in gen­er­al room light­ing. A chan­de­lier hangs on the back left, and a bright wall lamp hangs on the front right. I did­n’t real­ly like the result because of the sharp­ness of the pic­ture, also because of the pres­ence of shad­ows.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I can­not attach a lamp clip to the main table in the room — there is a thick edg­ing near the table­top. I will take it off hand.

I looked at how much the lamp con­sumes at a neu­tral col­or tem­per­a­ture, and this is tra­di­tion­al­ly the bright­est mode, since both “cold” and “warm” LEDs work simul­ta­ne­ous­ly.

The first pho­to is the max­i­mum bright­ness, the sec­ond pho­to is the min­i­mum bright­ness.

Let’s get back to our head­phones. Neu­tral col­or tem­per­a­ture, max­i­mum bright­ness. Smart­phone cam­era set­tings to “auto”. I usu­al­ly take 10–20 pho­tos from each angle, then select the best ones. And almost every­one had prob­lems with clar­i­ty.

Switch to warm col­or tem­per­a­ture. That’s how I had to take pic­tures, not very con­ve­nient.

Again at max­i­mum bright­ness. Clar­i­ty is even more of a prob­lem.

I’ll try to reduce the bright­ness by 2–3 points.

It got a lit­tle bet­ter.

Well, cold col­or tem­per­a­ture.

Again, sol­id “soap”.

I was some­what dis­ap­point­ed with the results of the work. But let’s try to assem­ble the lamp com­plete­ly. I have an old kitchen table with a match­ing top.

The length of the flex­i­ble leg with the lamp is 53.5 cm, the length of the leg with the hold­er is 32 cm.

The clothes­pin holds on to the table rather tight­ly.

We mount the smart­phone hold­er on the ball.

For clar­i­ty, I fixed a 5.5 inch Asus Zen­fone. Thanks to the com­bi­na­tion of a flex­i­ble leg and a ball, the smart­phone can be placed in rela­tion to the sub­ject at almost any angle.

We place the lamp in front of the cam­era. This time we con­nect the lamp to the pow­er bank.

The pho­to stu­dio on the table is ready!

I decid­ed to see if objects larg­er than the pre­vi­ous head­phones would cast shad­ows. He took off a dusty 10-cm dwarf from the shelf.

And in gen­er­al, it turned out well.

I put it stand­ing up, the angle is so-so, but notice that there are no shad­ows.

I tried to cap­ture the clock. They also turned out well. Only there was a prob­lem with the reflec­tion of the lamp in the glass.

Well, a wire­less mouse Rit­mix. Every­thing is good, only in some places there are glare. But they are also from nat­ur­al light.

Thus, exper­i­men­tal­ly, we found out that with the help of such a lamp it is bet­ter not to remove small objects “from the hands”. It is bet­ter to mount the lamp and the smart­phone per­ma­nent­ly, as it was orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed. The opti­mal size of objects for a pho­to is in the region from 5 to 20 cm. The dis­tance from the object to the cam­era is in the region of 20–30 cm.

Ring lamp Rit­mix RRL-091 may well be used as a bud­get option for back­light­ing for sub­ject pho­tog­ra­phy using a smart­phone.

Sim­i­lar to the exam­ples above, you can shoot videos for blogs in the style of “talk­ing hands”. That is, to do reviews of col­lectibles, to con­duct cook­ing class­es, man­i­cure mas­ter class­es, etc.

With prop­er skill, with the help of Rit­mix RRL-091, you can take pho­tos and videos of talk­ing peo­ple. For exam­ple, YouTube and Twitch stream­ing, some videos for Tik-Tok and Insta­gram live.

That’s all.

Thank you for your atten­tion.