The Zhiyun Cinepeer CF100 is an LED stick light. Zhiyun are best known for gimbals, but they make lights now too, and this one is bright, well-featured, reasonably priced, and aimed primarily at video shooters.
I am a film photographer, not a videographer, so the obvious question is why I am reviewing a video light at all. The answer is that all photography is lighting. Whether you are shooting motion picture or stills, digital or analogue, modern or nineteenth-century processes, you are working with light. Unless you are using a magnesium strip or pure daylight, you are not using period-accurate lighting anyway, so you may as well embrace good modern tools. The CF100 is a good modern tool, and the strip-light form gives me something my other lights cannot.
This review covers what it is, the constant-versus-flash question that it raises, and a 4x5 portrait shoot including dry plates at ISO 2 to find the limits of its output.
What it is
The Cinepeer CF100 is a tube or stick light: a long thin bar of LEDs rather than the usual square panel or round COB. It comes with removable barn doors. Underneath those, the business end is rows of LEDs behind a diffusing strip.
The controls and features:
- Dimmable across a wide range
- Variable colour temperature, warm through to cool, with a balanced daylight mix around 5800K
- A maximum brightness mode for full output
- HSI colour mode, which gives you the full rainbow of saturated colours (reds, purples, blues, the lot)
- Effects modes (FX), including SOS, TV flicker, “dodgy light” overhead flicker, fire, lightning, and rainbow
The colour and effects modes are clearly aimed at video and at people who want creative or atmospheric lighting. My kids would love the rainbow and fire modes. For my actual work, I will use exactly one mode: steady white light at a chosen colour temperature, for lighting still subjects. But the versatility is there if you want it.
Four push buttons on the back corners control dim, max, FX, and HSI. Simple enough once you learn which is which, though I managed to trigger SOS and fire modes by accident more than once while filming.
![PLACEHOLDER: the Zhiyun Cinepeer CF100 on a light stand with barn doors attached, lit white]
Why a strip light is interesting for photography
Here is the genuinely useful thing about this light for a photographer.
Almost every light source is, fundamentally, a circle. A bare bulb, a COB light, a beauty dish, a round softbox: all circles. A square softbox is a square. But the basic shape of most light sources, and most modifiers, is a roughly round or square pool of light.
A strip light is different. It is a long thin source. That changes the shape of the light falling on your subject, the way highlights render on a face, the way shadows fall, the gradient across a surface. It gives you a tool you do not have if all your lights are circles and squares.
For portrait work especially, a strip light lets you do things you cannot do with a round source: long vertical catchlights, edge lighting that runs the length of a body, gradients that fall in a line rather than radiating from a point. It is a genuinely different lighting option, not just another light.
I have a lot of panel lights and a lot of spotlights. I do not have anything in this strip-light shape. That alone makes the CF100 a useful addition to my kit, regardless of its other qualities.
The constant-light versus flash question
This light raises a debate worth addressing directly, because it comes up every time I use constant light on the channel.
There is a stigma among photographers that says you should use flash for serious work, and that constant lights are for people who are not good enough for flash. For most normal-ISO photography, flash genuinely is superior. I am not arguing against that.
But the physics is worth understanding, because it explains why constant light has a real place in some kinds of work.
A flash is an instantaneous burst. It fires over something like 1/200th of a second at most, down to 1/9000th of a second on some modern units. That is brilliant for freezing motion: the subject can move and it will not matter because the light exists for such a tiny fraction of a second. But because it is instantaneous, there is a hard limit on how much total light it can deliver. It is one pulse of as much light as the unit can produce.
A constant light source delivers far less light in any given instant. Over that same 1/200th of a second, the constant light is putting out a tiny fraction of what the flash does. But the constant light keeps going. Light accumulates over time. So while the constant light is, say, 1/200th as bright as the flash in any instant, over a full second it can deliver roughly the equivalent total light, because it has been delivering continuously the whole time.
The practical upshot: the total light output you get from a flash, you could potentially get from half a second to a second of a constant light source. If your subject can hold still for that exposure, a constant light is a viable alternative to flash.
This matters enormously for my work because of paper reversal and dry plates, where the effective ISO is around 0.6 to 2. At those sensitivities, even powerful studio strobes cannot deliver enough light in a single pulse to expose the image. I have tested this. Multiple strobes firing together still cannot do it. So for these processes, constant light is not a compromise, it is the only practical option. You accept the longer exposure and you let the light accumulate.
The trade-off is movement. A half-second or one-second exposure means the subject must hold still, which is a real risk with a living model. But for the low-ISO processes I work with, it is the trade-off you have to make, and a powerful constant light like the CF100 makes it viable.
The shoot: 4x5 self-portraits
I tested the light in my garage studio (which is also my darkroom, workshop, and dumping ground) doing 4x5 self-portraits with a Stenopeika Air Force 4x5 and a 210mm lens. My mannequin Gerti stood in for focus and lighting setup so I could get the look right before swapping myself in.
Setup one: top-down lighting. Mounted the CF100 above and angled down. This is my default for a one-light portrait, of a woman or of myself, because lighting slightly from above gives a flattering shadow under the chin (and hides a double chin, which is a consideration when you are the subject). The strip coming down at an angle gave a genuinely nice quality of light.
One issue: the barn doors reflected a fair amount of light straight back at the camera, which risked lens flare. Something to watch with this light in a head-on setup.
Exposure was a third of a second at f5.6 (wide open on the 210mm, not ideal but necessary for the light level). My first self-portrait came out slightly overexposed, which was a shame because the lighting was nice.
Setup two: seated, top-down, Fomapan 100. More controllable with me sitting down. The light closer, more directly overhead. The exposure was better this time, the focus was perfect, but I had focused on the mannequin’s position and missed my own face slightly. The perils of self-portraiture with a view camera.
Setup three: dry plates at ISO 2. The real test of the light’s output. Dry plates with an effective ISO of 2 are brutally light-hungry. I put the diffuser on (losing some output), kept the light very close, and cranked to maximum power. At max, I was getting usable exposures around half a second to one second, which for an ISO 2 process is genuinely impressive from a light this size. The frames were out of focus (my fault, not the light’s) but the exposure proved the point: the CF100 has enough output for even the most demanding low-ISO work, if you get it close enough.
![PLACEHOLDER: a 4x5 self-portrait lit with the CF100 top-down, showing the strip-light quality on the face]
Setup four: wider, colour film. Pulled back for a wider composition, focusing with a meter rule rather than the mannequin. Shot some colour sheets. One frame came out beautifully exposed and perfectly focused on the tip of my nose, which is technically excellent and compositionally strange. Once you have a technically perfect frame, you are free to notice that the shot itself is a bit weird.
Heat and battery life
Two practical observations from the shoot.
It runs hot. At around 60% power the light got noticeably hotter than I would expect from an LED. There are fans behind grilles on the body ready to kick in and cool it, but it does warm up significantly in extended use.
The battery readout is unreliable, possibly because of the heat. The light kept telling me it was nearly out of charge (down to one bar), then after a short rest it would be back to two bars, then twenty minutes later still at two bars. Battery readouts are temperature-dependent, so the heat may have been confusing the gauge. The practical result: it never actually ran out. I did the entire intro plus the whole shoot on a single charge. So the battery life is genuinely good, even if the readout is pessimistic.
The one real complaint: weight and mounting
The thing that makes this light unique (a long battery-powered strip) is also the thing that causes its one real problem.
The light weighs about 1.15kg, nearly 1.2kg with the barn doors on. That is not insignificant. When you mount it on a light stand and try to position it horizontally, all that weight is out on a lever arm, creating substantial lateral force on the stand. On my lightweight stands, getting the light horizontal and stable was a genuine struggle. With the stand legs oriented the wrong way relative to the light, it will pull the whole thing over.
So you need a properly sturdy stand, oriented correctly, especially if you want the light horizontal. This is worth knowing before you buy, because a light stand that is fine for a panel light might not be enough for this.
(I also could not work out how I would mount it behind my desk as a video key light, because there simply is not space back there for a stand sturdy enough to hold it. A first-world problem, but a real one.)
The verdict
I like it. The strip-light form is the headline: it gives me a shape of light I do not otherwise have, which is genuinely useful for portrait work and for adding variety to my lighting options. The output is good (enough for ISO 2 dry plates at close range, which is a real achievement). The colour temperature control, dimming, and colour modes are all well implemented. The battery life is good in practice. The price is reasonable.
The complaints are minor: it runs hot, the battery readout is pessimistic, the barn doors can throw reflections, and the weight demands a sturdy stand.
I will be keeping this light and using it for photo shoots, specifically for the kind of directional strip lighting it does that my panels and spots cannot. I might even press it into service as my main video light in the studio, in a top-down or side position. For a light I started out reviewing slightly sceptically (a video light, on a film photography channel) it has earned a permanent place in the kit.
You can find the Zhiyun Cinepeer CF100 at the link. The launch price was around $170, and there is a discount code (ZY10JXY510) for 10% off.
Big thanks to Zhiyun for the light and the discount code. The conclusion would be the same if I had bought it myself, which for a strip light this useful I might well have done.