Sunday 1 July, 2012   David A. Selby   Heads, Lencarta, Reviews, StroBeam   4 Comments

Strobeam and Lencarta remote-controllable studio flashes reviewed

If you’re based in the UK or Europe, you might be interested in the differences between monolights available from the various British lighting companies. Phil Harbord, a photographer based in Norfolk, has written comprehensive reviews of the Lencarta UltraPro 300, Strobeam EID G-5 and Strobeam DL250 Mark III. All these lights are remote controllable and offer some other unique features, but are they worthwhile tools in the long run?

Thanks to his experience as an electronics design engineer, Phil has managed to take exact measurements of flash durations and graph them using an oscilloscope, then demonstrate what this means in real life with some practical examples. He also tested colour accuracy, power consistency, build quality and the general ease-of-use.

Waveform of a Lencarta UltraPro 300's output at 1/8 power

Are the new remote-controllable lights from Lencarta and Strobeam worth ditching your Profotos for? Read the full reviews to find out.

For more information about these products and their pricing, visit the web sites of Lencarta and Strobeam.

  • Arek P.

    Lencarta UltraPro 300 is the equivalent of Jinbei Digital Pioneers III 300. I heard that the Jinbei factory branded lamps have different – more durable capacitors (This is done at the cost of a slightly longer loading time). I wonder if this is true?

    • David A. Selby

      I’ve seen both the Lencarta UP and the Jinbei DPsIII. The Lencarta 600 seems to recycle faster than the Jinbei 500. So there is certainly something different inside.

  • Garry Tyler

    I have found this in the past with the Lencarta Safari’s. Very cheep parts inside that made them very unreliable, they seemed to be a Jinbei light that has no reliability, my opinion is cloned build and then sourced cheaper components for it.
    I have seen the Strobeams at Focus this year they seemed very well speced and certainly produced the results(on the stand – not real test i know) that they say they are capable of. 9 fps bursting in there FP mode and they were more than powerful enough to play around with even in the NEC with all its crazy lighting, I was still able to produce some stunning portraits of other customers there as well as some great shots of the poor lad shaking his hair/head all day long to show the speed of the flash duration and recycle time. But only time will tell if they reliable.

  • http://www.lencarta.com Garry Edwards

    Actually Garry, you’ve got it the wrong way round:)

    Lencarta lights perform better than Jinbei because we get them made with components that suit European weather conditions and European shooting styles – i.e., most photographers in Europe need much faster recycling than Chinese photographers because we tend to take more shots, and to use digital. In China, film is much more widely used, less shots are taken and the style of shooting is generally slower. And temperatures in China are much, much higher than here. Faster recycling creates more heat, the heat doesn’t cause problems here but would cause problems in China.

    It must be obvious that producing flashes with higher performance means that more expensive components need to be used and that it costs MORE to produce Lencarta flashes than the standard Jinbei ones – and anyway, it would also be much cheaper just to buy the standard production models than to design our own and get them made specially.

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