Smallrig L10 LED Vlogging Light Review
Smallrig L10 LED Vlogging Light
The best portable beauty light on the market.
Smallrig L10 LED vlogging light 3242 with smartphone bracket
A year of working from home has made abundantly clear that most of us have pretty poor lighting in our makeshift Zoom studios. Personally, my wife and I float between our home office and the kitchen table depending on the day and our workloads. The office benefits from having large, north-facing windows, but the kitchen lighting leaves much to be desired. Enter the L10.
The Smallrig L10 is sleek and portable. It’s much different from the usual industrial camera equipment that I normally use. When folded up, it measures about 6 inches in diameter and 2 inches tall. It has a sort of clamshell design that opens up and allows the telescoping stand to extend the top of the light panel to 22 inches. The panel itself is an edge-lit LED array which makes the light pretty soft despite the relatively small surface area. The panel can rotate 180 degrees for easy positioning. The six section telescoping stand is made of aluminum and feels very sturdy. It is a bit stiff to extend and collapse so be careful with how you’re pushing and pulling on it. There is a lock at the bottom of the stand where it meets the base. I don’t feel the lock is completely necessary as there’s a fair amount of friction to hold the stand at any angle from 0 to 90 degrees of placement. The whole thing has a solid weight to it. When fully extended, the base has enough heft that the whole thing won’t topple over.
Smallrig L10 LED beauty light in various configurations
The base features a simple five button touch control, battery level indicator, and a 5v USB-C charging port for the 3600mAh internal battery. The light has 5 brightness levels and 3 color temperature settings: 3000K, 4000K, and 5500K. The 3000K setting is most similar to standard warm incandescent light bulbs while the 5500K is most similar to daylight. The 4000K setting sits right in between as a good blend of light commonly found in your home. The battery life is very good—I’d say around 4 hours depending on your brightness level. You can also keep the light plugged into power while in use of course. The base also has a soft foam pad underneath to protect the surfaces you place it on.
The included bracket assembly is very versatile. It clamps anywhere onto the stand with a screw clamp and also features a ball joint for easy positioning. There are two device brackets that feature spring-loaded flip-up arms to hold onto your devices. Depending on your setup, you can use one or both to hold a smartphone or tablet horizontally or vertically or even hold two smartphones. You can also, of course, just set the light up behind your laptop’s webcam for easy lighting in Zoom or Teams meetings.
To me, this light is an awesome evolution in the mobile, consumer-friendly lighting market. Right now it seems the standard is large, cumbersome LED ring lights with bulky stands and equally bulky power supplies. The stands are often too tall for placing on a table and instead need to be placed on the floor. The controls for these lights are almost always on the backside making controlling them difficult. And, from what I’ve seen none of them have internal batteries. The Smallrig L10 by comparison is super compact, versatile light that offers the flexibility I need at an awesome price. So, to summarize:
Compact, clamshell design
Internal battery with a standard USB-C charging port
5 brightness levels
3 color temperatures (3000K, 4000K, 5500K)
Great smartphone/tablet bracket
Good value at $60
Specific Use Case—Remote Productions and Interviews
I work in higher education communications and marketing. Over the past year we’ve done a ton of remote lectures, events, conferences, and “fireside chats” through Zoom. I’d say the one consistent pain point of these from a video producer standpoint is poor sound and lighting in people’s homes. We especially want our upper administration to look their best, so we’re bummed out when their home setups don’t live up to expectations. We’ve brainstormed some options like putting together a limited number of video kits that we’d mail to VIPs as needed that they’d return to us when they’re finished with them. The issue was that standard ring lights were bulky, difficult to position and setup, and expensive to ship. The Smallrig L10 solves all these issues. The design and size make it the perfect lighting solution within our mobile video kits.