Rotolight Interview Kit Review

This month we decide to surprise Jim in his cage and see if we could illuminate him with the new Rotolight Interview Kit.
Highly portable and extremely user friendly, Jim was beaming all over – pardon the pun.
The Rotolight has already been around for a while with many cheaper copies trying to emulate the brand. This new package is good.
It’s a complete lighting solution on the run.
The first thing he noticed was the excellent pouch that the whole thing comes in. Jim was prancing about with it attached to his Viper assistants belt , and the great thing is it is designed to house more than just the rotolights and gels and mounts, there is room for pencils pens cleaning brushes and cloths – even room for Jims banana !
The next most attractive items in the package are the mounts themselves – nicely branded and very easy to snap on and use. No need for expensive Nogi arms here. These mounts have cold shoe fittings and screw threads for fitting directly to lighting stands too. Very usuable and quick.
So what about the actual lights themselves – Well, again, many boxes ticked here.
The great thing here is the fact the kit comes with two fixtures, usually these type of top lights are supplied alone and that only makes for a useful top light. These babies are in twos and therefore make life easier for lighting on the hoof. Jim set them up all over the cage in varying different set ups and was pleasantly surprised by the adaptability. The really good thing is that they can be used as a very close up light source without totally washing out the subject, thanks to the supplied pre-cut ND gels.
They can act as a ring light or a top light onboard camera or a stand alone lighting fixture, as before the sexy part of the rotolight is the fact it will screw to a normal light stand and can give a fairly decent light throw to a subject.
They are balanced to daylight and can be altered with pre cut gels (supplied) to balance to indoor very easily. Even as the battery runs in the 3^rd hour we had no drop off or loss of colour temperature. It is possible these lights could run for much longer (Jim is not sure of the current draw) but we thought 3 hours was amazing compared to our old battery belts that are lucky to squeeze out 30 minutes at full power.
They are very light and so perfect for onboard mounting with no cables running to power units.
They are very adaptable and can be mounted above , below or to the side of the camera.
They are also ideal for the new wave of 5d/7d shooting packages out there – you really can run and gun with these.
They run on AA batteries and we had our set running for at least 3 hours non stop.
So after many hours of playing Jim finally handed our rotolights back and gave them a big thumbs up.
Now we have to put our money where our mouths are and buy some kits to supply to our clients !
Jim Ratings –
Ease of use – 4 monkeys – would have been 5 but took 5 mins to work out how the mount worked !
Battery life – 5 monkeys – great power
Usuability – 5 monkeys – very adaptable piece of kit
Size, weight – 4 monkeys – you wouldn’t even know it added weight to the camera
Overall – 5 monkeys – time to buy some !!