LASTOLITE LUMEN8 400W TWIN KIT
A decidedly heavy-duty, heavyweight build meets retro styling in this old-school studio flash kit. There’s nothing flimsy or newfangled here
The Lumen8 400Ws heads at the heart of this Lastolite kit are about twice the length of the Honey Badger heads and, at 3.3kg each, they’re more than twice as heavy as any competing heads on test. An upside is that heavy heatsinks enable a fanless design, so the heads remain blissfully silent, even in prolonged operation.
Around the back, heavy-duty rocker switches are completely at odds with the sleek pushbutton interfaces of other heads on test, and a big 1/4-inch sync socket replaces the small 3.5mm socket of other heads in the group. The stepless rotary power knob lacks fine-tuning precision, especially as there’s no digital display.
For outright power output, the Lumen8 heads gave a maximum of Gn 51 in our tests, only drawing level with the Interfit heads and losing out to the 400Ws Elinchrom and Metz heads. Recycling speed is also a bit more sluggish after a full-power flash, at just under two seconds. A further slowdown is that the pair of supplied 60cm square softboxes are very fiddly and timeconsuming to set up. On the plus side, the softboxes are certainly durable and the 2.95m lighting stands are the tallest on test.
As with the Honey Badger head, there’s only a basic optical slave mode, so you can’t program the heads to ignore the pre-flash pulses of flashguns. The Lumen8 heads also lack built-in RF receivers but, if you want wireless RF triggering, the basic companion Lumen8 Radio Trigger set is available separately for around £45/$60.