Shadow Caster vs Lumitec vs Lumishore vs Abyss vs Liquid Lumens
[PICTURES IN MULTIPLE POSTS DUE TO PIC PER POST LIMITS!]
I posted this in the Mastercraft forum but I lurk in the other company forums too and thought this information would be useful for any brand of boat. I noticed someone started a topic referencing the threads on other sites but I was planning to post direct here directly I just hadn't got to it yet. Also This forum only allows 4 pictures per post so that is going to be tough. Ill have to cut out a lot of pictures and post them out of context in separate posts.
I decided to tackle underwater leds for my 2013 Mastercraft X-25 this year. After looking all over the forums for info on the brightest lights, I found there wasn’t a lot of information to get a true comparison of all the newest lights from some of the top companies. I wanted to see these lights for myself before drilling 16 holes in my transom (plan to do 4 surface mount lights). I obtained a pair of lights from each of these companies and built a testing setup to truly compare these lights with all equal variables with my own eyes.
I wanted to film and take pictures so that everyone else can see the comparison first hand without having to rely on people’s opinions that may not have seen all the different lights.
I’ll give my opinions and my final choice and why, but mostly I want the pictures and videos out there for people to see the differences for themselves.
I used both an iphone X and gopro hero 6 to do this comparison. I locked the exposure for each set of pictures as well as the color temperature on the gopro to give all lights completely equal variables for visual comparison purposes. Im not a photographer by any means and these pictures don’t look pretty but they serve their purpose for comparing.
I AM NOT BEING PAID BY ANY OF THESE COMPANIES OR DOING THIS FOR ANYONE BUT MYSELF AND THE READERS OF THE FORUMS. I am completely unbiased and just trying to decide which lights to put on my boat permanently.
This is a visual comparison only. I am not measuring any lumen values. These lighting companies each have testing facilities to obtain those lumen numbers, and I am not concerned with them for this comparison.
I wanted an RGB setup so the lights I chose to compare are all RGB versions. The lights being tested are:
- Liquid Lumen RGBW
- Abyss Medium starfish multicolor
- Lumishore SMX153 (SMX93 is identical in performance but controlled with toggle switching instead of their lumi-link system that is required for the SMX153)
- Shadow-Caster SCR-24 Color Changing
- Lumitec SeablazeX2 spectrum
These are all the most current lights from each company. I know the Liquid Lumens light has been around for about 4 years now vs some of these others were released much more recently. The Lumitec Seablazex2 spectrum and the shadowcaster scr24cc are pretty new if I recall.
Initially I was only trying to compare brightness and not controller features. After installing and using 5 separate RGB light systems, I realized how important it is to have a good way to control the lights. I figured what’s the point of having multi color without being able to easily control it.
This was done on Kentucky Lake in Gilbertsville, KY. KY lake has a muddy bottom. The water is very murky. Keep that in mind with these images and videos. This is more of a test to compare all the lights with equal variables than it is showing off the raw performance of these lights. I have no doubt they would look much better in clearer water but this is where I boat and I am sure many other lakes are similar to this as well.
[SIZE="4"]Comparison Video Link! (see pics below as well)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvlQG5X23DM
THE TESTING SETUP
I have 7 XS power XP3000 batteries on the boat for a total of an 840 aH battery bank. There is more than enough power here to keep each light operating at optimal performance. I ran knukonceptz 4 gauge OFC wire to two bus bars mounted on a board in the storage compartment as pictured. All lights and/or their controllers were wired directly to these bus bars so each light has equal electrical setup. This looks like absolute chaos but everything worked well. 5 of the batteries are pictured here and 2 more are hidden in front of the drivers helm.
https://i.imgur.com/XPf8EN0.jpg
All light pairs were mounted to a test board. Each light in a pair was 21 inches apart. The liquid lumens light was removed when illuminating the other lights since they are so thick and could potential hinder light spread from the adjacent lights. The board was submerged underwater under the platform of my X25 with a weight to hold it steady from floating up. The lights were all submerged in about 12 inches of water.
https://i.imgur.com/Q1aEJRd.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/OKfSpPa.jpg
BRIGHTNESS, COLOR, AND SPREAD
If I learned anything doing all this it’s that nighttime photography with pitch darkness and very bright lights is very difficult. Below are the pictures that seemed to best represent what the eye saw. Some colors were better depicted with the iphone than the gopro and vice versa.
This video is from my iphone with exposure and focus locked throughout the entire video. (I tried to embed it but could not figure it out.) I feel it gives a very accurate overall perception of the lights compared against each other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvlQG5X23DM
Brightness in white
To me Liquid Lumens seemed the most intense bright white but it was a very narrowed beam and actually did not project much further than the other two brightest whites which were lumitec and lumishore. They both spread light much much better as well. The projection distance would probably be different in crystal clear water but in KY lake water Liquid Lumens did not project noticeably further than competitors. Lumitec may be slightly brighter than lumishore but to my eye it was pretty close.
Next would be Shadow Caster. They still sent light about the same distance it just didn’t feel as intense. Then Abyss for the white brightness. These two lights use a combination of red green and blue to produce a “warmer” white. They do not have white LEDs whereas Liquid Lumens, Lumitec, and Lumishore do.
Colors (see pics bellow and in following posts)
Blue
Abyss and Lumishore have a very deep blue color that I thought looked absolutely awesome as well as good brightness. Liquid lumens blue seemed a small bit lighter in comparison and about the same brightness. Shadow Caster’s blue was more of a light blue or baby blue than the Lumishore and Abyss.. Lumitec has a bright blue but it seems like they mixed in white led’s with it so it doesn’t have near the appeal the Abyss and Lumishore blues do. I’ll touch on this in a minute but it was also hard to stop exactly on the perfect blue with the Lumitec since there is not a controller available for it yet so I got the closest I could and white led’s may partially stay on for their blue color or I didn’t get stopped on blue perfectly.
Red and Green
Lumishore and Abyss had similar very deep colored green and red. Liquid Lumen was a slightly lighter hue of each. Lumitec again was hard to stop on a perfect green and red but they seemed just as bright as Lumishore and Abyss with not quite the deepness in color. Shadow Casters green and red both had a lighter hue than the others.
Light Spread
Shadow caster seemed to have the widest spread of all the lights tested. Lumitec Lumishore and Abyss had about the same spread.
Liquid Lumens has the least spread of the 5 lights compared. As mentioned earlier this is by design in this particular model (RGB only comes in one lens) to concentrate light for better projection. I did not appreciate significantly further projection but I think that has to do with murky waters.
Controllers
Lumishore takes the cake hands down here with their LumiLink control system and is a large reason why I have chosen Lumishore for my permanent installation. This requires the SMX153 light. The SMX93 would operate very similar to the seablazex2 which I’ll touch on below. The lumilink control system allows for complete control through their EOS STV 2204-i display. Which requires a 83mm x 83mm mounting location. It can also be mounted in a hidden location and controlled completely through smart devices. (iphone android etc). It puts out a wifi signal and allows for browser control of the entire system with any web-enabled device. No app required. I used an iPhone for testing and it worked very well as it mirrors exactly what the screen on the controller shows. I’ll get more into that below.
Second in controls would be Shadow Casters zone controller kit. 4 separate zones can be set. They work with rgb wiring so you could potential incorporate any brand rgb lighting (speaker rings, led strips, etc) into the underwater lights all using the same controller separated by zones. The SCr24cc can be controlled through toggle switch only but the zone controller makes it quick and simple. No display readout but it illuminates the zone number with the color it is set to.
https://i.imgur.com/NLj1SdL.jpg
Some thoughts from Liquid Lumens on the review
I’ve been meaning to weigh-in and provide some feedback from the perspective of Liquid Lumens ever since Calvin did this thoughtful and thorough review. First off, I’d like to thank Calvin for reaching out and taking the time to do this comparison. We’re all here because we love boating and want to be able to make educated decisions and pick the best products for our own boats. Any time a consumer takes the time to get involved with various companies and their respective products and bring all of us together, we all learn and the community benefits. I can’t speak for my competitors, but I know that customer feedback and input is the most important factor driving innovation for Liquid Lumens. Things we learn from everyone here, helps us to move innovation forward and create better products and provide better services to the marketplace. So again, a big thank you to Calvin.
My purpose of participating here, isn’t to be critical of the comparison or to try to convince anyone of anything. It’s simply to provide information about Liquid Lumens’ designs, thought process when creating new products, and to help everyone understand why we choose to build our lights the way we do. That being said, I’m also hoping to receive sincere feedback from the community, as it helps us get better as a company and in turn build better products.
Lastly, before I jump into the specifics of the product review that Calvin did, I am going to point out that there are some obvious and glaring flaws with the way the tests were performed that merit mentioning. Especially because they were discussed with Calvin, in detail, prior to our participation in the comparison. I can understand that they presented logistical issues for Calvin with configuring the test and I also understand his reason for abandoning the originally discussed test method. A test like this is complex, time consuming and expensive to conduct. Calvin is a consumer just trying to pick the product he wanted to personally use on his boat and was willing to share what he learned in the process. So, I can’t fault him for that. However, I would be remiss to not share that information with the group to be fair and openly considered when digesting the information here.
It is unfortunate for all of us that the originally intended comparison wasn’t able to be conducted as part of this test, because it’s not often one consumer has so many of the top products in the space together for a review of this magnitude. After reading the review back when he posted it, I felt that information was important for everyone’s consideration. With that said, here goes.
The first thing I think that needs to be noted is that there is no way to quantify the light output of each light when the products weren’t photographed side by side simultaneously. Period. The types of camera used (iPhone and GoPro) share a similar flaw for this type of photography. Exposure lock, the method Calvin used to capture his images, is specifically designed to achieve optimal exposure for an image, regardless of ambient light. This means the camera would auto-adjust its settings from one shot to another or one light product to another, from frame to frame. In other words, the camera itself was deliberately attempting to level the playing field between various products that very well could have been producing two very different amounts of light.
In a fully adjustable/professional camera, the photographer would have the ability to control settings of both f-stop (aperture) and shutter speed in order to choose a fixed value for both to use across multiple shots. This would create the ability to compare, at least to some extent, from one shot to the next holding all other things equal on the environment and camera settings. In the configuration Calvin used, it is important to note that an iPhone acts exactly like the human eye does, when exposure lock is enabled. It automatically adjusts itself to the ambient light to achieve optimal exposure/eye comfort for it to properly view its environment. In other words, the camera was literally trying to make every single light photographed appear identical in terms of exposure/brightness. As everyone knows, the human eye automatically adjusts to ambient light in the same manner. So, turning one light on and observing it visually, then turning another light on individually, and so on would also be challenging to distinguish differences with, from product to product, with the naked eye, since the products were never illuminated side-by-side. Because our lights are so intense and bright in the center, due to the way we focus them, as Calvin noted, we have always found them difficult to photograph. The “hot” center area of the light overexposes and dims out peripheral light on film. I'm sure our competitors face similar challenges when photographing their own products. But more on our design, and why that design, later.
When I first spoke to Calvin, I pointed out how difficult it is to photograph extremely bright Underwater Lights and make them truly representative of their performance. As we discussed this, he agreed and said that he would mount two boards, similar to the one he built, and hang them back to back with lights aimed in opposing directions, where he could have two differing light brands on simultaneously aiming away from each other for a true side by side look at each brand next to the others. We were looking forward to seeing those images, as that would have been a much more accurate representation of how each product stacked up against another. But unfortunately, that configuration was abandoned in lieu of what was done.
In the garage setting, you can see the hot spot in the center area of the wall in the Liquid Lumens images. If that brighter area of light was overexposing the camera and/or someone’s natural vision, it would naturally result in making the surrounding light seem less intense. I can’t say for certain that was the case, as I wasn’t there, but it’s food for thought when considering the review.
The key thing I want to discuss on behalf of Liquid Lumens, however, is why we use the focused beam of light and also why the hot center instead of a flat lens flood pattern of light, like many of the other products reviewed here and elsewhere. I would answer that question with a couple of my own questions to each of you… How do you use your boat? What do you want the lights for? And, where specifically do you want the light to show up when you are using your boat?
When we set out to create better performing lights for our own boats, we asked the question:
https://www.liquidlumens.com/wp-cont...-Bear-Lake.jpg
(Customer submitted image of their boat using Liquid Lumens Skinny Dip Lights)
Although this is our entry level light, I think this image does an excellent job of illustrating just how impactful the use of focusing lenses is on projecting light behind a boat. Shot from this angle, the overpowering "hot spot" of our lights doesn't overexpose the image and prohibit us from seeing just how far they can carry in certain environments.
https://www.liquidlumens.com/wp-cont...led-lights.jpg
This image shows a similar angle from behind the boat, but a closer view, of our RGBW Light pattern. Now this next photo is where it begins to get interesting...
https://www.liquidlumens.com/wp-cont...ts-surfing.jpg
Notice that when the boat is weighted down, configured for surfing and underway how the light is now angled into deeper water, no longer directly behind the boat like we see when the boat is at rest in the other images, like my previous ones as well as Calvin's. We've also introduced prop wash, bubbles and other disturbances to the water that reduce the lights performance when compared to a boat at rest in calm water. Without intensifying the light (boosting voltage) and focusing it through the center of everything going on behind the boat, it would barely be visible in the wave, if at all. At least that was our own experience as fellow boaters, which is why we developed this design. We wanted it to project so intensely that it still showed up all the way back in the wave while underway in these conditions. I think this image does a nice job of illustrating how the light penetrates the messy water and still shows up back by the surfer, including in the troughs and further out of the wave where he is riding.
Even still, once we started using our own products, we loved how well the center of the wave lit up, but also wanted more peripheral light. Enter Top-Side Lights...
