NAB 2022: Aputure’s LS 600c Pro joins the lighting wars

Okay, maybe lighting wars is coming on a bit strong, but there has been a lot of lighting news from this year’s NAB and the new Aputure Light Storm is up there with the most interesting.

At heart, the new LS 600c Pro is an RGBWW overhaul of the existing 600d, but also breaks new ground for the company by being its first full-colour point-source light fixture.

Primed to be available in Q3 this year for around the $2500 mark, the 600c Pro is built around a RGBWW LED chipset capable of 600W of total output. Built on a Bowens mount and available in in V-mount and Gold mount models (it draws 720W) , it features a tunable colour temperature range of 2300 to 10,000K, 0.1 to 100% stepless dimming, fully tunable green-magenta adjustment, covers 90% of the colour spectrum in the Rec.2020 color space, and features more than 300 full RGB light source and gel presets.

Add in 15 built-in lighting effects and four dimming curves, and there’s a lot that can be done with this. As befits its Light Storm heritage it also ships with several control methods including Sidus Link Bluetooth App Control, LumenRadio CRMX, Art-net/sACN via EtherCON, and 5-pin DMX input and output. It also allows for 10 programmable presets, 3-pin XLR power input via battery or AC adapter, four fan modes, and it's weatherproof to boot.

It comes with the LS 600 series hyper reflector which enables users to concentrate the light output and at 5600K reach 4,150+ lux at 3 meters. Add in the BM1215 Hyper Reflector, and the light boost that further with a claimed output of 17,480+ lux at the same distance.

There is a lot of competition in this space at the moment, with a real tussle starting to open up on price/performance, arguments about specs, and which technology is best suited to the job, RGBCAL or RGBWW. Definitely a sector to keep tabs on and make any purchasing decisions carefully.

Also worth a quick mention of a couple of prototypes the company had on show: a new foot-long RGBWW tube light, the MT Pro, which will hopefully go on to be the first in a range, and an improved version of its tiny business card-sized RGB light, the MC Pro. The first version of that was released at the last NAB, which was in 2019, and the three years have yielded a pleasingly symmetrical 3x increase in lighting power.