Photography Lighting Is Incredibly Cheap Now

In my hand right here is a new compact strobe by Neewer. This is the Q120, and this light is packed with features, but probably the most impressive thing about this light is the price, and the direct competitors to this light are the Godox AD100 Pro II, which is $300, almost double the price, and the Profoto A2, which is $900. Now, as you may know, I have done the most ridiculous in-depth testing of speed lights. And battery-powered strobes in separate other videos. This size and power output of light sits right in between the power of a speed light and the next level up of battery-powered strobes like this one. This is the Profoto B10X. The benefit of a light like this is you're getting around two-thirds more light output than a speed light, but you're getting it in a package that's almost the same size or volume as a speed light. Now, the first thing I noticed when I pulled this out of the box was a feature that I absolutely love. This thing does have a USB-C jack in the side of the light itself, but more importantly, they put USB ports on the battery. So you can plug this in while you're using it if you want to use it wired, or you can be charging multiple batteries off to the side without some proprietary charger. I am sick of proprietary chargers. I wish every battery for every product I own had a built-in charging USB-C port built right into it. Now, when it comes to the button layout and the UI, it's okay, it's not. Quite as intuitive as I would have hoped. And although I do fully appreciate having a physical knob, this knob isn't quite as quick or as accurate as I would like. And of course you can't really compare it at all to Profoto's knobs, which work incredibly well. But each time I find something like this that annoys me just a little bit, I have to remember the price of this thing and go, well. For the price, it's still incredible. Now, Neewer just sent me their new touchscreen remote control for this light. And this thing is incredible. And it's almost strange how good this is compared to the built-in UI on the light itself. And maybe what they're thinking is that you're never going to use this UI on the light itself. You're always going to be controlling it with a controller. It's just weird to have a remote with a UI this incredibly smooth on this remote. And then the UI on the light itself feels like it's 10 years old. The remote has an incredibly quick touch screen built in as well as a physical knob here that turns and you can press it and then make changes with the knob if you don't want to touch the screen. This is great if you have gloves on and what makes this remote even better is that you can also choose to control Godox lights with this remote if you want. They have a list right now on their website and they say specifically this remote can control the Godox V1, the V100, the IT32, the AD100 Pro 2, and the AD200 Pro 2. That means if you already own those Godox lights and you're looking for another cheap light to include and you like this remote control, you can buy this system and integrate it in with your other Godox lights. One important note though is that this remote and this light can work on the Godox X system ...or the newer Q system, but it can't do both at the exact... The exact same time. Now, after playing with this remote for a few minutes and then reading what it's capable of doing, I was sure this remote was going to cost more than the light itself. I just looked it up. It only cost 80 bucks. It's crazy how cheap this photography gear is getting. Now, the next question I had was, how do you actually mount modifiers onto this light? I don't see any clips at all. And this is incredibly small. It's not like it has some sort of standard mount built into it. And Neewer thought of that as well. They sent me this Bowens mount modifier here and this has a very unique design it has this plate right here that can slide out of the way and if you leave this plate in This adapter will screw down onto a speed light and then this is a standard Bowens mount here and you can attach speed lights to soft boxes or any other light modifier if you want. But this is a little bit larger than a speed light so you slide this out of the way and the light slides right in here and then you just screw down this rubber clamp on top and this thing can get tight. I mean, there is no way that's moving. And then this extra plate right here can just slide right next to the flash itself and it stays out of the way. Neewer sent me three softboxes. Let's check them out. All right, it's just a standard Bowens mount at that point. And can I say, these new softboxes are so much better than the old ones that had individual sticks that constantly fall out and get lost. I freaking love this. And then to break it down here, you just hit each button one more time and everything compacts down. Yeah, so much better. One thing I do wish they'd change in the future, I want them to print the actual size of the softbox in each one of these bags. I have so many freaking softboxes, and if they don't actually print what the size is on the bag, I have no idea. I have to open them up, build them to figure out what size they are. So in the future, newer, please just write what it is right there. Each one of these softboxes comes with a diffusion panel as well as a grid if you want to use it. This one looks very similar, also a circle. It's just larger. Here's the biggest one they sent. And there we go. Can you even see me anymore? It's huge. Now when I really started digging into the menu of this light, and then I went through the spec sheet and could read everything it can do. I mean, it's ridiculous how many features this light has. I've made a very detailed chart in the F-stoppers post. If you wanna read that and compare this light to the other competitors, you can see exactly what it has and doesn't have, but basically it has everything. And it even has a bunch of features that I did not expect at all. One feature that I love that comes on most speed lights is the ability for the head to zoom. So it can change the throw of the light. It can send it out further or it can send out a wide beam. This actually has that feature as well so you can go into the menu and change how wide the beam angle is. I did not expect this to have a wireless optical slave built in. It does. It's got high speed sync up to 1/8000th of a second. The battery has 420 full power flash pops in it. This light even has app control if you want to control it wirelessly from your phone. And it even has additional magnetic accessories. Some come with the light and some you can buy separately. And for those of you wondering just how powerful this light is, here I am standing in shade, but with direct sunlight behind me. And check this out. With this flash at full power, you can get an even exposure here. So when it comes to value for money or features for money, this light really has no comparison. Its price is unbelievable for what this light can do. It's really going to come down to, is this the right light for you personally? For me, as somebody who occasionally shoots events, I would lean towards choosing speed lights rather than this flash because you're only getting around two-thirds of a stop more light by using this flash over a speed light. And then if I needed more light output, I would probably choose a larger, more powerful battery-powered strobe. But I also understand that many photographers don't shoot events ever. They will never use a speed light. They don't like speed lights. They don't want them. And so for them, this might be the ultimate battery-powered strobe. Well guys, thanks for watching. If you'd like to see another super nerdy flash shootout where I compare this light to the competitors on every single front like I've done in previous videos, let me know in the comments below. And if you'd like to learn more details about this light and see a chart that compares every single feature side by side, check it out on F-stoppers. I've linked it in the description below.