Seemingly from nowhere, Aputure seems to have become one of the most in-demand lighting manufacturers in the lighting rental market today. The LED lighting specialist was founded in 2005 by a team of filmmakers and videographers who wanted to create high quality content, but struggled with the steep cost of equipment needed to do so. in an attempt to create professional-grade equipment at an affordable price, they started Aputure.
For us, it was the launch of the Lightstorm 600D in 2020 which really propelled Aputure from a prosumer brand, in to a real contender to replace and complement both HMI and Flash on the commercial sets we work on. As Todd Blankenship of Premiumbeat hypothesised, with the 600D and its stablemates “[Aputure] will truly usher in a new era of film lighting”.
With its 720w max draw, the Aputure 600D has a comparable output to the Arri M12 or D12 on flood (600D = 100,000lux with hyper reflector 55º, M12 = 65,000lux at 62º, D12 = 70,000lux at 50º). Whilst the M18 offers more light from a single fixture, it’s possible to run more fixtures on a single circuit with the Aputure. Oh, and they can also run on batteries…
Rather than attempting to develop their own mount, requiring yet another speeding to fit common modifiers, Aputure opted to use the ubiquitous Bowens S mount, meaning it’s easy to fit modifiers from Bowens, but also Profoto, Chimera, and any number of number of others by using the appropriate Bowens speeding.
Aputure also developed their own line of Lightdome and Lantern modifiers, as well as the 2x and F10 Fresnel, and the very popular Spotlight Mini and Spotlight Mount adapters which allow Sputure Lightstorm fixtures to be used in a similar fashion to the ETC Source4 or Leko.