Shoe-mounted fill lights are great for shining a light on your immediate subjects during shoots. While they work great for traditional photography equipment, they’re not quite as useful for 360-degree cameras, which require the same illumination for both the front and rear sides. The Harlowe Omni 360 2W Video Fill Light is designed specifically for that.
No, it’s not the first lighting accessory of its kind, with many outfits already selling similar 360-degree fill light designs for shooting spherical footage. It is, however, one of the most affordable we’ve seen yet, making it a great choice for anyone not wanting to spend $300 for a low-powered camera lighting accessory.
The Harlowe Omni 360 2W Video Fill Light is a compact fill light that illuminates in all directions, making it ideal for use with 360-degree cameras. According to the outfit, it creates a balanced wraparound light that will keep faces, scenes, and anything else going on looking natural and consistent by reducing uneven shadows and harsh hotspots. It’s rated at just 2W of output, so it provides a diffused soft glow that should work well for nearby subjects, although you can boost it up to 4W for a short amount of time if you need the extra illumination.
The accessory comes with physical buttons on top for adjusting brightness and color temperature. You can also use it for 180-degree directional output, in case you need a more conventional front-facing fill light. Apparently, it also supports gesture control, although we’re not sure what kind of gestures it’s able to recognize. We guess that will come in handy for those times you don’t want to risk touching the setup and moving it out of place. It also comes with onboard memory, so it can remember the last settings before you turned it off and restore it the next time you power up the device, ensuring easily repeatable setups between shoots.
The Harlowe Omni 360 2W Video Fill Light has a cold shoe mount that, the outfit says, is rugged enough for mounting not just on cameras, but also cages and rigs of all sorts. There’s also an underside magnet, in case you need to snap it onto a ferromagnetic surface. Since it uses a cold shoe mount, there’s an onboard battery for power, which can run at up to six hours continuously at the lower setting (25 percent). At the highest setting, it can run for just 90 minutes before needing to plug back in. There’s a four LED battery indicator on top that shows you how much charge is left by 25 percent increments.
Dimensions are 2.8 x 1.8 x 0.95 inches (height x width x depth) with a weight of 1.9 ounces, so it’s compact enough to slip into a small pouch on your camera backpack. It’s IP54 rated for dust- and splash-resistance, by the way, so it should be safe to take to your outdoor shoots, so long as you don’t expose it to too much water.
The Harlowe Omni 360 2W Video Fill Light is available now, priced at $95. You can also get it in a bundle with a cage either for a DJI Osmo 360 or an Insta360 X5.
Liam Henderson
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