Vijim VL196 Photo and Video Light Bar

Hi all! It often hap­pens that with a sub­ject pho­to or video shoot­ing at home, the light­ing leaves much to be desired. Espe­cial­ly, this man­i­fests itself in late autumn or spring, when nat­ur­al con­se­cra­tion is not enough at all. Of course, pho­to-video edi­tors, to some extent, can improve the result, but this is far from always the case. There­fore, I have long been look­ing at a not very expen­sive and com­pact uni­ver­sal tool that could improve the qual­i­ty of pho­tos and videos tak­en at home under arti­fi­cial light­ing. As a result, I set­tled on the new VIJIM VL196 mod­el. It will be dis­cussed in this review.

By no means do I claim to be high­ly pro­fes­sion­al in this area, how­ev­er, for those who write reviews and just want to take home pho­tos or shoot videos in bet­ter qual­i­ty than the usu­al light­ing lamps that we use at home, this light pan­el will def­i­nite­ly an inter­est­ing propo­si­tion. In addi­tion, it has a num­ber of inter­est­ing fea­tures in addi­tion to sim­ple back­light­ing.

The device is deliv­ered in a high-qual­i­ty, beau­ti­ful, and just the same gift box:

Inside, every­thing looks like a smart­phone pack­ag­ing:

Com­plete set: pan­el, instruc­tions, charg­ing cable, mount­ing hinge plat­form, two dis­si­pa­tive sil­i­cone pads.

The pan­el itself in shape and size real­ly resem­bles a gad­get, only instead of a dis­play there is a mat­te-milk dif­fus­ing plate:

Device Spec­i­fi­ca­tions:

• Brand: VIJIM
• Mod­el: VL196
• Col­or tem­per­a­ture range: 2500–9000K (± 200K)
• Bat­tery capac­i­ty: 3000 mAh
• Oper­at­ing volt­age: 7.4V
• Charg­ing time: 2 hours (when using QC3.0 com­pat­i­ble charg­er)
• Pow­er: 12W
• Usage time: ~120 min­utes (at 100% bright­ness)
• Illu­mi­na­tion angle: 120°
• Num­ber of LEDs: 128
• CRI: 95+

The body is made of brushed alu­mini­um, paint­ed black. On the reverse side there is a very small dis­play show­ing the oper­at­ing modes:

The col­ored bar below is a reminder scale and dis­plays the cor­re­spon­dence of the “degree” that is dis­played on the dis­play to the col­or of the light emit­ted by the device (I will explain a lit­tle low­er):

On one of the sides there are con­trols: a rub­ber pow­er but­ton, a col­or change return lever, a bright­ness con­trol:

On the oth­er side is marked:

At the bot­tom there is a mount­ing hole for attach­ing the pan­el to the mount­ing plat­form (for a 1/4 screw), a tri­pod, etc.:

The Type‑C charg­ing con­nec­tor is locat­ed on the top:

Dimen­sions of the device and com­plete acces­sories, as well as its weight (206 grams):

A few words about acces­sories… The hinged plat­form on which the light pan­el is mount­ed is about 5.5 cm high and has a tilt lock. With the bot­tom plat­form, it can be mount­ed on the screw of the tri­pod head or mount­ed on the flash pad on the cam­era:

You can choose and fix a con­ve­nient angle to illu­mi­nate exact­ly the shoot­ing loca­tion:

In the kit, as I already men­tioned, there are two sil­i­cone pads (or cov­ers) that are put on the pan­el: mat­te white for even more “soft” light dif­fu­sion and smooth­ing con­tours, black with hon­ey­comb-shaped holes, as if to empha­size the “light” tran­si­tions ‑shad­ow”. The cov­ers are sim­ply put on the pan­el and held by the sides, holes are pro­vid­ed in all the right places for fas­ten­ing and access to the pan­el con­trol:

The pan­el is turned on by hold­ing the pow­er but­ton for two sec­onds, the logo appears on the dis­play.

The device is ready for oper­a­tion almost imme­di­ate­ly, the mode in which it worked the last time is switched on. The dis­play is small, but every­thing is clear­ly vis­i­ble on it. Dis­plays the select­ed oper­at­ing mode, remain­ing bat­tery pow­er, col­or tem­per­a­ture / hue degree, bright­ness:

The dis­play is locat­ed well, the num­bers are always in front of your eyes:

There are three pan­el modes in total. Switch­ing modes is car­ried out by briefly press­ing the pow­er but­ton.

CCT mode. We can con­sid­er that this is the main mode for shoot­ing, in this mode the white col­or tem­per­a­ture is adjust­ed in a wide range from 2500 to 9000K and the bright­ness is from 0 to 100%. In fact, you can achieve both warm and cold and nat­ur­al light­ing. The move­ment step is 10K, the tem­per­a­ture is adjust­ed by the return slid­er on the side pan­el by shift­ing it up or down. If you hold the lever in the extreme posi­tion, then the tem­per­a­ture val­ues ​​\u200b\u200bchange rapid­ly, after releas­ing it, it returns to the cen­tral posi­tion. The bright­ness is reg­u­lat­ed by the sec­ond vernier, the adjust­ment is smooth. Below is a pho­to with a short expo­sure in dif­fer­ent val­ues ​​​​of col­or tem­per­a­ture and bright­ness, you can see that there are two types of LEDs:

The bright­ness of the pan­el is real­ly high, the luxme­ter gave a max­i­mum of 528Lux, at 100% bright­ness and a col­or tem­per­a­ture of 6800K at a height of 60cm from the table:

And this is how you can light up a room with­out oth­er light sources:

Now you do not need to car­ry a back­light lamp in the evening, the light is right on the cam­era:

Shoot­ing is much more con­ve­nient than in a pho­to­box, you are actu­al­ly not lim­it­ed by any­thing:

Sev­er­al dif­fer­ent col­or tem­per­a­ture options for one scene: 2500K, 4000K, 6800K, 9000K:

But if you put on a white cov­er, then the light real­ly becomes “soft­er”, more uni­form and you can get rid of glare:

The hon­ey­comb case makes the scene more clear­ly defined, but the bright­ness is sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er with it:

RGB mode. In this mode, instead of white tem­per­a­ture, we change the light col­or from 0 to 360°. As far as I under­stand, this is a kind of inter­pre­ta­tion of the chro­mat­ic ring, where each col­or or shade has its own degree.

The pan­el can real­ly give out light of almost any shade. It looks very inter­est­ing:

The device itself, with a scat­ter­ing case on, looks like an art object 🙂

Scene with shoot­ing in dif­fer­ent col­ors. You can achieve both a “thick” base col­or, and soft and tran­si­tion­al shades:

scene mode. This is the mode for shoot­ing video. There are 20 dif­fer­ent scenes of flash­ing lights, for exam­ple, to sim­u­late the work of the “chan­de­lier” of a police or fire truck, the effect of mas­sive paparazzi flash­es, a smooth change of col­ors, etc. Here is a list of “scripts”:

The sequence num­ber of each scene and the name is shown on the dis­play. You can adjust the bright­ness:

In terms of bat­tery life and charg­ing, at 100% bright­ness, the light­bar lasts 2 to 3 hours, depend­ing on the mode, but full bright­ness is not need­ed all the time, so on aver­age we can say that the charge lasts for 5 hours. When con­nect­ed to charg­ing, the dis­play shows the cor­re­spond­ing icon with charg­ing progress:

The device is charged with a con­ven­tion­al charg­ing cur­rent of about 1.3A in a lit­tle less than 4 hours. And if you use QC3.0 charg­ing, then even faster.

If nec­es­sary, the light pan­el can be mount­ed on a tri­pod:

Even with pro­longed oper­a­tion, the tem­per­a­ture of the device ris­es insignif­i­cant­ly — about 46 ° C on the emit­ting side, and 36 ° C on the reverse side:

Sum­ming up, I will say that for myself I con­sid­er this device one of the best pur­chas­es I have made on Aliex­press late­ly. The VIJIM VL196 LIGHT PANEL is well-made, has great func­tion­al­i­ty and per­fect­ly expands the pos­si­bil­i­ties for prepar­ing high-qual­i­ty pho­tos and videos at home (and not only).