small, but POWERFUL Lights | SIRUI C300XII and 60X

These are some of the most compact yet powerful lights I've used that don't break the bank. Let's take a look. This is the new Sire C300 X2, and this is the new Sire 60X. Both of them are bi-color LED lights, and I'm gonna break down each of them individually, but let's start with the smaller one first. Let's talk about the output of this light. So I'm gonna go ahead and get it fired up by flipping the little on switch here, and then you actually rotate this knob to turn it on. I'll go ahead and keep this at 1% right now so I don't blind you guys. This has a 60 watt output, so for its size, that's pretty incredible. It's also bi-color. You can actually hit this little knob on the side, press in that button, and you can change the color temperature, and it goes anywhere from 2,500 Kelvin all the way up to 6,500 Kelvin, so you can get very warm or very cool with it. It gives you a lot of room to dial in just the right color temperature for your scene. Now, let me show you really quick just how bright this gets. This is 1%, and I'm gonna kinda just point this right at the camera, and I will go to full 100%, and you can see it just completely blows out. Obviously, super, super bright, incredibly bright light. Very impressive just how much light is packed into this. There, see, I'm completely blowing out. This is 100%, and this could, of course, replace the key light that I'm currently using because it's just so incredibly bright. The form factor, of course, of this is really unique. It kinda looks like a little camera itself with this little grip and this little lens on the front. Definitely has kind of a camera body aesthetic to it, and I like it. Overall, the entire thing is basically made of plastic. Now, this, of course, does two main things. One, it keeps it very lightweight. This is only 1.1 pounds, and it has an internal battery included inside of it, and I'll talk about that in just a minute, but it also keeps it really affordable, and I'll talk about the price a little bit later on in the video. Some of the only things that appear to be made of metal are this lens, which has kind of an aluminum housing to it, and then you have a couple other pieces of metal here like the 1.25 thread on the bottom for, of course, mounting it. So, for a size comparison, I'll just compare it to my iPhone 14 here. This is not the Max or anything like that. It's just a standard size. You can see it's actually shorter than my phone itself, and then height-wise, it's just a tiny bit taller. Now, from my experience using lights similar to this and this light, lights like this with the COB, the chip-on board, get very hot. So, luckily, Sire has put vents all over the top, the side, the bottom, and even a little bit on the front here to help this thing cool down, and I haven't had any issues with it overheating and turning off, but I will say that at 100% and running for, you know, 30 minutes or so, it definitely gets really hot to the touch, so that's why it's nice there's this grip here. Now, I've gone ahead and turned this back up to 100% because there is an internal fan built into this as well. Now, of course, something to be aware of anytime you're dealing with fans on a light and you're, of course, recording audio like I am right now, you don't want the light to be too close to your microphone, otherwise you might pick up that light hum. Now, this is not too loud. It's around 25 decibels. I didn't find it to be too loud or obnoxious to be picked up by a microphone within about, say, five, six feet away from a mic. That's pretty good. I'm gonna hold it right up to the lav mic. Obviously, this is not normally where you'd be mounting the light, but let's take a listen. And I'll go ahead and move it away from the lav so you can see just how much quieter it gets. When it comes to actually mounting this light, there's really only one quarter-twenty thread on the bottom. So, if you have a light stand that has a quarter-twenty thread on the top, that's, of course, gonna work to just thread it right on. Luckily, they do include a little mount, and this is actually a Bowens mount adapter, but it serves two purposes. So, I'm gonna go ahead and get this mounted right now. So, now with the Bowens mount adapter on here, of course, you can put any Bowens mount thing on there, like a softbox or a reflector. So, I've got the reflector that actually came with the C300X2. This does not come with it, but it'll support any. So, there's a good chance you already have a reflector like this laying around, and you can see just how that looks. So, it's hilarious because the reflector itself and even the mount are just so much bigger than the light. There we go. There's 100% with the actual spotlight on there, and you can see just how bright this actually gets. Very, very bright, very, very spotty, of course, with this adapter on there. So, I like that a lot. It's definitely really, really powerful. Look at this. Just how it illuminates my office here. Let's take an even closer look at this mount itself. So, there is a little knob here that you can loosen. And then, once you have this on top of something like a light stand, a C-stand, you can, of course, articulate this anywhere that you need it to be, and then tighten that down. And of course, this just has a standard little mount here to go directly on top of a C-stand. Now, this whole Bowens mount is also made of plastic, which does give me a bit of hesitancy. Although this is a pretty lightweight light, I could see this breaking over time, especially just because once you start tightening all these things down really tight, they can break. Of course, it hasn't broken on me yet. Now, let's talk a bit about the internal battery. So, obviously, I haven't been plugging this into anything to actually turn it on. That's really nice to be able to just quickly grab this and get some light, put it anywhere that you need to. If you run this at 100% brightness, which you saw was very, very bright, it'll last for about 45 minutes, which, of course, isn't very long, especially if you're doing an interview setup. But if you're running something like an interview, you're, of course, just gonna plug it directly into power. And it just uses a standard USB-C input here. So, it comes with a USB-C cable. I'm sure you have different ones laying around. And you can, of course, just plug it into any outlet or power bank and keep this thing running even longer. But if you run it at 50% brightness, it'll run for 90 minutes. And then if you run it around 30% brightness, it'll go for roughly two hours. Now, on the back here, there's a little LCD display where, of course, you can see your brightness, color temperature, and other settings. And then you just have this simple knob to go through the menu. You have OK and a Back button. And we'll go to Effects, and then I'm gonna hit OK. And here is where you can go through a handful of different effects. So, you got kind of like this pulse and glow effect, lightning effects, flash photography. Honestly, I'm not really an effects person. It's not something that I typically use. If that's something that you need, you need that lightning effect or TV effect, just know that they are built into it. Basically, every LED light that I've reviewed in the past five years has some sort of feature like that built into it. It's kind of standard now. There's also a battery indicator on the back so you can see just how much battery life you have left on the light. The light has a CRI of 95, so basically hitting kind of the acceptable industry standard these days of being at least 95 or above. That means that you're not gonna get weird color casts on skin and things like that. Now, I'm gonna throw this little lens back on there. So, of course, this is a really kind of mini reflector versus something like this, the full-size Bowens. But I'll shine it on my back wall here so you can see in comparison what it looked like with the other larger reflector. So how have I been personally using this light? Well, I've been using this as a hair light because it's small, it's compact, it's easy to boom out on a C-stand, or I've actually been mounting it up on the rail on my ceiling, and that's been nice because I can just point it in just the right spot and have it act as a back hair light. And because it's so lightweight and compact, it's easy to hide, rig, and power on set because it has that internal battery. But don't be fooled by its small size. It can definitely be used as a fill light or, of course, the key light, especially depending on where you have it mounted. Like here at 100%, it's way too bright. But if you get it in just the right spot, let me go down to 10%, you can see that's already even brighter than the key light that I'm using. This is definitely gonna be my new go-to light when I have travel and I gotta board a plane and I can't pack really big and heavy lights. This is absolutely what I'll be taking. Another accessory that comes with this light is actually this little silicon dome, which at first I thought was just a cover for the lens, but it's actually meant to be a little bit of diffusion. So I'll go ahead and slip it on here. And you can see how it actually softened the light quite a lot. Now, because it is still so small and so close to the light itself, it's not gonna soften it up nearly as much as you'd want to. Of course, you want a softer piece of material, a few feet from the light itself to shoot through. So what are some of the drawbacks of the 60X? I'd say one of the largest ones is that if you're gonna rely on the battery life, it's not super long, being in that 45 minutes to maybe an hour and a half, depending on the brightness of it. The other thing I'd say is it only has this one quarter 20 thread to mount on the bottom. So that's not the greatest thing because if these threads go bad, you won't have another way to mount it. Okay, I've talked a lot about the new 60X and its features. Let's talk about the price. Right now, early bird pricing on this is only $99 US, which is just an absolute steal for how bright this light is and having an internal battery built into it. All right, now let's take a closer look at the new C300 X2. So this is a 300 watt light, so five times more output than the 60X we were just looking at. And I'll go through a couple of these specs pretty quickly because they're a bit similar. It is an all plastic housing, which of course keeps it lightweight and more affordable. There's a quarter 20 thread on the top and on the bottom for mounting. It's also a COB light. Of course, the chip on board here is much larger. It's bi-color and will go anywhere from 2,700 Kelvin to 6,500 Kelvin. It has a standard Bowens mount on the front, so it doesn't require an adapter like the smaller 60X. And it comes with this reflector that I was actually using on the 60X earlier. So I'll show you that. Now, one of the first main differences here, besides the output of course, is that this does not have an internal battery built into it. So if I go and try and flip this thing on, nothing happens, right? Let's get this thing plugged in. There's a little port here on the bottom where it just screws in. And it's a locking connection, so it's really nice to know that this is not gonna get unplugged on you. I'll go ahead and power it up with the little power button back here. And I'm gonna take this thing all the way up to 100%. So obviously, way brighter than the 60X, just completely blowing out the scene. Holy cow, that's bright and pretty warm. Definitely warm on my face. The other one did not let off that kind of heat. I'll show you how it's kind of spotlighting on my studio here, so you guys can see just how bright it is in comparison. I'll show you the color temperature change here, 6,500 Kelvin down to 2,700 Kelvin. Of course, just like the 60X, it has all those different light features built into it, like lightning and other flicker effects and everything like that. Now, I'm not sure if you can hear the fan or not. We're only at 1% brightness right now, and it's already kicked in. You can see on the back here of the light that there's a really large vent, very large opening, and I can actually see the fan spinning there. So, because this light has so much output at 300 watts, essentially, this entire light is basically a heat sink. So, it's hard to see on camera. Basically, from here to here, there's just an entire heat sink. There's vents on the top, of course, on the back, like I already showed you, on the bottom, on the front little side here. Now, because the light has that active cooling with the fan, it's basically on all the time. It is a bit louder. It's about 30 decibels. So, let me be quiet here for a second, and I'll hold it to the lav. Then I'll put it out at arm's length like I did with the other one. So, if you're using this as a key light and you've got it just out of the frame, it really shouldn't be picking anything up. When it comes to using the light itself, it's very simple. It also has a little LCD display on the back, just like the 60X, to show your settings. Has two knobs. You can quickly dial through brightness and color temperature. Now, both of these lights do have a Bluetooth option, so if you need to control them remotely, you can do that with the app. I haven't been doing that. I usually just prefer to use the knob. Could, of course, be used as your key light, but this is also a great light that you could put through a lot of diffusion. Basically do a book light. You could bounce it off of the ceiling. Right now, I'm literally bouncing it off of the ceiling and I'm completely blowing out, which is just great. A lot of times with these COB lights, they have huge ballasts. This is it. This is the whole thing. It's actually smaller than the light itself, which many times I've seen the ballasts from certain lighting companies be even bigger than the light. I won't call anyone out, but this is a very small one. It does have a little fan built into it. Something interesting I found is that even when the light is off, the fan is still going. Not exactly sure why. Let's take a look at a few other ways that you're gonna actually power this light. It does include a full V-mount plate. So this is a dual V-mount plate and it has a little clamp here. So you can actually clamp it right onto a C-stand. I'll throw my little small rig V-mount battery on there. All right, I've grabbed a second V-mount battery here. When you're running a light like this, this 300 watts output at 100% brightness, your V-mount batteries aren't gonna last very long. These are 99 watt hours each. So this is really nice though, cause you're gonna have a full battery powered light out in the forest, out in the streets, wherever it is. And this keeps the whole setup really compact and small having it just this. So let me show you the third and final way that you can power this light. So Sire just released this H99 Pro battery grip. This thing is pretty cool. It's actually made of full aluminum housing. So it feels really solid. It has a quarter 20 thread here with locking pins on the top. So we can actually mount this right onto the light. This D-tap cable that comes with it will actually plug right into the side of the battery grip. And I accidentally mounted the light upside down, but it doesn't really matter. So there we go. This whole thing is now completely battery powered running off of this. Of course, the runtime on this setup is gonna vary depending on how bright you're actually running the light. And of course, the nice thing about this battery grip is that because it has that USB-C port, you can power all types of accessories, your phone, whatever it is. So it is multi-use. And there is a little LED battery indicator here on the front. So you know just how much juice you have left. And on the bottom, you have quarter 20 thread and a three eighths thread. So a few different ways that you can actually mount the battery grip as well. And this battery grip comes in at only $99 US. When it comes to actually mounting this light, like I said, there are these quarter 20 threads around it, but if you don't wanna just thread it onto that, it does come with this little kind of grip, almost like a handheld grip that can go onto a stand. So I'm gonna screw this into the bottom here using the quarter 20 thread. You can just tighten this right onto your C-stand and then you can articulate this just by loosening the knob on the side here, any direction that you need to. Can you hear that? Again, it's all made of plastic. It's not their most robust mount ever, but it definitely does the trick. I'll show you the soft box that you can actually get for this from Sire. This is not included with the light, it is separate, but it is a pretty big soft box. And I'll put the dimensions up on the screen. Now I have the egg crate on there right now that cuts down on the light spilling around the room a bit. You can of course use this in the horizontal mode like I have here. You can loosen this screw on the side of the soft box and actually rotate it. So if you need your soft box to be vertical, go ahead and tighten that back down. And now you can mount it and use your soft box in a vertical orientation. The soft box does come with this little carrying case. It's called the quick soft box. It was really easy to open and deploy. 300X2 also comes with its own carrying case. The smaller 60X doesn't, but it's such a small light that literally you can throw it in your backpack, a Pelican, whatever. And once you open it up here and you look inside, it has different pieces of foam that this whole light all fits inside of. All right, I've talked a lot about the C300X2. So what is the price point of this light? The early bird pricing right now is only $300 US, which again, I thought was an absolute steal. I thought it'd be at least twice as much as that with lights in this similar output of 300 watts. If you want to pick up any of the lights or accessories that I talked about in this video, definitely check out the links in the description below and take advantage of that early bird pricing before it ends. I want to say a special thanks to Sooray for sending these lights out for review. They didn't pay me to say any of this or see this video before posting. All right, guys, if you want to see more videos like this, hit subscribe right now. We're almost to 100,000, let's go. All right, I'll see you in the next video.