Recently a company reached out and asked if I would be willing to put together a fair review of their little bi-color Colbor W100 COB LED light. I say little as an adjective, not a pejorative term, because this thing is shockingly small. It’s like holding an oversized disposable camera. These are my findings.

I won’t lie, at first my expectations were low: the box says it’s 100 watts, but what does that mean for output? The entire thing is made out of plastic, does that reflect the quality of the LEDs? I’ve never heard of Colbor and there’s been a ton of new lighting companies that have sprung up recent, some of dubious quality, so what would I be getting here? Could this light even be worth the ultra-low budget price tag of $170 that it comes in at?

Well, right out of the gate I decided to go for the throat and just test the spectral output and quality. What’s the point of even looking at the rest of it if the light itself isn’t up to scratch?

I went into a sealed room, plugged the thing in, flipped it on, and immediately I’m blind. This thing is bright. The size of the COB itself in comparison to the body is actually pretty decent, reminding me of the giant sensor in the small-ish body that is my Fujifilm GFX50R, so that’s a point in its favor I suppose, but before we get to that: how’s the spectral performance?

I pull out my trusty C800 Spectromaster and… 99 TLCI!? I test it again… 99. The whole spectrum from 2700K-6500K, 97… 98… 99… 99… okay now I’m intrigued. It’s a couple hundred kelvin off here and there, but that’s honestly more common than you’d think and easy enough to correct for if you do have a color meter like this (except for at the very top end 6500K setting since there’s no headroom to move into). It also can tint a little magenta depending on the setting but nothing too crazy, generally only needing ⅛ Plus Green to fix and at 4300K it apparently doesn’t need any correction. It also didn’t seem to tint or drift appreciably one way or another when at lower power levels. I dug deeper.

At full power with the included reflector on this thing is giving us the output of an Arri 300 tungsten fixture at full flood. Actually a little more. The Arri photometrics app says at 1m you get 418fc from the 300, and this little guy is kicking out 470fc at 2700K ramping steadily up to 582fc at 6500K. Not bad at all. I would have killed for something like this in film school! Instead, for roughly the same price, we had those 750w Tota-Light flood units that you’d melt anything within walking distance with, and that thing only would get up to around 360fc at 1m. Good times.

The whole range of color temperatures (at 100% power with the included reflector on) measured thusly:

*TM-30 Values are expressed wholly as Rf & Rg: Fidelity (accuracy) and Gamut (saturation). Rf values go from 1-100, 100 being the best, and an Rg number above 100 is, roughly, oversaturated and under 100 is undersaturated (the graph that you get with each measurement tells you in which specific color zones those saturations change, but the number represents an overall average). You can think of Rf as a “better” CRI-type metric, similar to TLCI, although TLCI is specifically calculated for a camera-as-observer whereas TM-30 is viewer-agnostic.

These results are honestly… really good. The CRI was around 95/94 across the board, which is good, but we don’t necessarily judge lights on that metric for film use anyway and even so there was no color that was showing as limited (that coveted R9 value was just as strong as the rest of the colors) and spectrally everything seemed pretty smooth with no weird spikes, obviously aside from the blue end getting a significant bump in the Daylight-side of the range.

At this point I’m really digging this little offering from Colbor, but my brain still wasn’t quite comprehending the size-to-power ratio. Was I missing something?

For a comparison, then, I grabbed my Godox SL60-W from storage (a bit cheaper than the W100 coming in at $140), a light I remember quite liking when I was still primarily using budget fixtures, and gave that the 1 meter test. Same room, same stand, similar setup with its reflector, and was… mildly unsurprised with the results. I was whelmed you could say. It made sense.

As it’s a single-temp light (Godox says 5600K) I only did a brief test, and at 100% with the included 4.5” long reflector I got ~580fc, so similar to the W100, but at 5037K! That’s way off target. That being said, it was metering at 98 TLCI and an Rf of 92 and an Rg of 100 so that’s pretty good. Curious, I tested it with the nicer 6” long reflector from my Nanlite FS-300 (it has a more traditional checkerboard pattern on the inside, similar to the Colbor one, as opposed to the “dappling” of the Godox reflector) and got a whopping 1310fc with similar spectral readings so that confirms what I thought: the W100 needs a bigger reflector option. 

The issue is the W100 uses its own proprietary mount akin to a mini-bowens, so you will be limited to any in-house accessories Colbor offers, but of course you could just use the reflector and put your own diffusion in front of it like you normally would if the optional 11” wide parabolic softbox wasn’t cutting it (said softbox will bring the whole package price up to around $200 at the time of this writing). The plus side of the SL60 or similar lights like it is that they have a standard bowens mount, but without any modifiers at all and placed in the exact same location as the W100, the SL60 is giving us 279fc at 1m whereas the W100 hurdles over it at 376fc. The included W100 reflector is only 2” long so maybe a 4” option or larger would be beneficial. That would of course limit the spread but maybe that’s okay! I’d just like to see some options/tests. I’d also love to see a fresnel and spotlight accessory for it, where I think you could really get some extended utility out of of the fixture.

All that being said, the W100 is far, far smaller than the SL60, is bi-color, and can be battery powered which I think are big advantages for roughly similar performance, so I’d stick with the W100 given the option (especially if I could get those extra accessories). Putting it in the win column overall, then, what are the negatives?

As I mentioned, it’s entirely made of plastic. This doesn’t instill a ton of confidence in its robustness but I did see a YouTube video where someone dropped it a bunch of times onto some concrete and it survived so that’s promising. That is also likely one of the things keeping that cost to the consumer so low so you can’t complain too much.

If you were to hand-hold the W100, you kind of instinctively grip it like a photo camera and that could lead you to accidentally pressing the power button or bumping the output or color temp knobs. You may ask why one might do that, and the reason is that it’s actually able to be battery powered (as opposed to using the included wall power brick) via certain PD-USB sources, or more likely DTap via DC Barrel, and that could lead to its use as a great eyelight or fill while on the move, depending on the base exposure of the scene (could be a key in low light!). However in that case, and really in most cases, you’d probably use the softbox which will obviously lower the intensity a few stops, so your use and mileage may vary. At its brightest setting of 6500K, I was getting f8 at one meter with the softbox and just over f16½ with the reflector. Not too shabby.

Obviously with all that power comes heat, and I will say the front of the W100 gets warm pretty fast. Not “melt a gel” warm, but you certainly can feel it if you’re close enough. To combat that the unit has a big fan on the back which I’d probably just leave running non-stop instead of utilizing its automatic mode as it’s not terribly loud. You can hear it, but I don’t think your audio person would notice unless you were filming in a cramped bathroom or something, and even so a very light noise reduction would delete it no problem. Your tolerance may be different than mine, though. As an aside, it would be kinda cool to see if you could somehow swap in, say, a Noctua fan which would (if my computer is anything to go off of) make the unit completely silent. Someone get on that.

One thing I wish I could test but was unable to get working at the time of this writing was the app. It could just be the fact that I’m on Android and it seems like most companies prioritize that ecosystem last, but attempting to add the light to the system would just give me a perpetually spinning ring. What did (sort of) work was the little NFC chip in the “grip” part of the light. All you have to do is open the app, turn on the light fixture, and tap your phone to the grip and it (in theory) just adds the light to your “scene”. When I did it, you’d see that it recognized something there, but again would just give me the spinning ring. Ah well.

All in, I really dig this little unit. For what it is the output is lovely, it’s dead-simple to use, only offering two knobs for temp and power (which can go down to 1% in increments of 1, with the color temp moving in increments of 100K) and a fan button up top that, again, I’d probably just leave always-on, and it’s affordable. Another thing I kind of enjoy is that, if you tap either knob it will cycle through preset power (25/50/75/100) and Kelvin (2700, 3200, 4300, 5600, 6500) but does so with a nice fade and not just an abrupt shift. That’s a little attention to detail I really appreciate, and could be useful if you were to do any lighting cues. It also saves the state it was in before it was powered off or unplugged, so if you needed to blackout and then strike it at a specific value, that’s possible.

Would I recommend this light? Sure, if it fits your needs. It’d likely be a tough sell as a straight-up key light if you were to try and fill a big piece of diffusion, but if your frame is tight enough and the quality of light was what you wanted, you can go right ahead! For tabletop stuff or inserts or whatever it’s a great option, and obviously if you need something with some punch in a tight space, this thing can handle that no problem. As a travel light it’s a no-brainer. I really do like the idea of it as a mobile eye/fill light, as I mentioned earlier, and using one of the three available ¼”x20 threads I was able to mount a little peg and a V-Mount making a neat little handheld unit which I enjoyed playing around with very much. All-in-all, a solid offering from Colbor.

I think that covers it.