Hands On With The Luxli Taiko 2x1 RGBAW LED

One light that sort of slipped under the radar in recent months is the Taiko. This 2X1 made by the Norwegian manufacturer Luxli was first demonstrated in NAB 2019 but only reached the market a few months ago and it brings several interesting features including a fully passive cooling system which makes this light totally silent. Earlier this year Rubidium Wu (from crimsonengine) had a chance to look at a sample of this very interesting light and had some very positive things to say about it.

There are plenty of 2X1 LED panels on the market these days – some of them are pretty awesome and prices are also coming down. So how could a small Norwegian company like Luxli stand out? well, they have done several things that you might consider exceptional with the Taiko that might make you consider it over some of the competition.

First, this light, as noted above, is completely silent using a giant heatsink on the back (actually the entire back part of the light is a heatsink) With most light above 100w (and surely 200w like the Taiko which uses 250w) you need some sort of active cooling and if you want to stay silent you must reduce the power to 50%. Not so with the Taiko – it can run at 100% and still work perfectly fine. Interestingly, despite the metal heatsink it is rather thin and only weighs 9kg/19lbs which is certainly portable.

Talking about portability – you can use it with dual flight safe (v-mount) batteries at full power with almost no loss in output – this is not something that you can say about most other 2×1 lights with over 200w power.

Another interesting point – unlike most lights (including some more expensive ones), the Taiko is actually made in Norway not China (although obviously some of the components are sourced from China).

Official Luxli Taiko video

If you are looking for a more technical review, Matthew Allard from newsshooter recently published a very extensive review including lots of technical data and tables about the Taiko which is really worth checking out – here.

In terms of actual output – without diffusion, you are looking at over 13,000lux at 1m and about 7000lux+ with medium diffusion on – which is very respectable. As for color reproduction, you are looking at really great results of 97CRI and 99 TLCI with SSI of 74 which is very good at 5600K.

There is a lot more to say about the Taiko (it is an RGBAW light so you can really fine-tune colors and play with the RGB and from 2800-10,000K color temperature), it has a really nice app and super simple controlling knobs with a screen on the back. It is DMX controllable as well and is pretty robustly built.

As for pricing, at $1700 this is going to be pretty hard to beat (just consider this – the industry-standard ARRI SkyPanel S30-C cost almost 3 times as much).

You can find a lot more lighting tutorials on our photography lighting section here on LensVid.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.