Reinventing The Lightbulb

I may be a little late to the party, but I finally bought a few aputure b7c bulbs for practical light sources and I absolutely love them. Aputure literally reinvented the light bulb. If you don’t know what these bulbs can do, check out this video:

Aputure Accent B7C Light: Unboxing, Overview, Operation, App Control & Review!

I’m moving to RGB lights to use more color in my shoots, so these bulbs were some of the missing puzzle pieces.

I may be a little late to the party, but I finally bought a few aputure b7c bulbs for practical light sources and I absolutely love them. Aputure literally reinvented the light bulb. If you don’t

You're aware that the Astera NYX bulb came a year before the Aputure B7c?

I own a couple from both. The biggest annoyance with the B7c is the fact that its internal battery discharges itself so fast during storage and that even in the app you cannot read the charging status anywhere while the B7c is connected to AC power. Its only shown when you are running on battery.
Literally every time I take my B7cs out of the storage their batteries are empty and need to run on AC power or get charged first.

The NYX have a far better versatility with all the accessories you can get for them. No internal battery but an input for USB power. They also look a lot more like standard bulbs than the spacey B7c.
But the initial costs are much higher for the NYX universe.

I've found both performing similar in brightness, the NYX being a bit brighter. Both have their strengths and weaknesses at certain RGB color ranges.

BTW, you did a nice review here.

Thank you! I had no idea about the Astera NYX bulb. I looked it up. It's about $35 more expensive. They look pretty similar. I don't regret buying the B7Cs. They've worked well for me. I must admit, I use them more with AC power than DC. Now I will remember to charge them right before using them if I need to use their batteries.

the BC7C's are great, but I agree with Robert. They are rather difficult to handle. The Sidus app can crash, does not always recognise the bulbs, does not always indicate the power status. As he said, on AC they just indicate AC, not the battery charging level. There is a charging level indicator by pressing hardware buttons, but when using the Sidus app it is often not quite clear.

I have the full set with charging case. It is great, no worries about the charging state of each bulb. But as soon when I put the BC7C's out of the case in a location, on battery, the charging state can vary drastically. In the first half hour you have confirmation of over 90% charge of all bulbs, then it becomes more erratic. One or two hour later you see single bulbs go out. They just go zero. You have actually no real control, no good overview.

There's much to be improved, but I fear that the current BC7C's are just what they are. Firmware upgrades seem not to happen at any time.

It's a new technology. In 9 years these problems will be gone.

These bulbs are great for what they are today. And, despite the connectivity problem that is still there, the Sidus app has progressed in a good way. It can take some time until you get to the point you've started last time, but then it is somehow reliable. A new feature makes it easier to program a set of bulbs, like colour change with speed parameter and general intensity control.

Although not too much reliable, there are hiccups.