Gear


Four Cool Products We Spotted at WPPI 2018 Launchpad

February 27, 2018

By Greg Scoblete

PWP Studio

There’s plenty of new gear making its debut at WPPI and the Launchpad event lets photographers get up close and personal with the gear in a more intimate setting. Here’s a few of the products that caught our eye.

Cactus RQ250
The new RQ250 is an incredibly compact 250 W/s battery-powered monolight .The specialized flash head works with a reflector to keep hotspots to a minimum. It can deliver 400 full-power flashes on a single charge. It boasts an LED modeling light/AF assist lamp and a Bowens S-mount adapter for adding modifiers. The flash will support TTL and HSS for a wide number of cameras. The RQ250 will ship in the summer. Pricing hasn’t been set.

FrameALIVE
FrameALIVE lets you turn static album pages into dynamic video presentations. Photographers upload an image and video through the FrameALIVE website or app (iOS and Android). Video uploads can be as long as 100 minutes, though the company recommends keeping them to 30 second clips. The photo you upload alongside the video can be printed (anywhere) and has a little graphic to alert the viewer that the image has an associated video (this graphic can be a custom icon the photographer creates). When a viewer opens the FrameALIVE app on their phone and hovers the phone over the print, the video that’s associated with the image will play automatically thanks to the app’s image recognition technology. You can pay $2 for one FrameALIVE. Subscription options are also available.

 

Anthem One
This super bright LED light has interchangeable light cards that let you change the color temperature, intensity and color quality of the light simply by popping off a magnetic housing and unscrewing four screws. The Anthem One is able to pump out the equivalent of a 400 Watt HMI with less power and in a more compact size. The light cards are sold separately for $170. According to the company, the light cards, which feature tiny LEDs on them, will grow more powerful with time as LEDs grow stronger, meaning the light is future proofed to an extent. You can buy the Anthem with a power pack or a lithium ion battery. Price starts at $1,500.

 

StickyEmail
From the folks who brought you Sticky Albums, comes StickyEmail. It’s basically an automated email system you can embed on your website to automatically prompt customers to input their emails. Visitors to your site will see a small pop up window where they can enter their email and the StickyEmail system will automatically generate a series of emails designed to entice them into becoming paying customers. Photographers will have the option to customize the copy of those emails if they like, but otherwise the system is designed to be a plug-and-play email marketing solution. Pricing wasn’t announced.