4 hours ago, Barmaglot said:For the reference, here is a test shot from a Sea & Sea YS-110a, which uses a similar triangular arrangement (source):
Very nice piece of testing. He managed to find an underwater light meter.
As you can see at 1 meter you can see the shape of the bulbs and multielement produce more hot spots
However there are few considerations to be made:
1. While for close up you may use one strobe for wide angle you will use two and when you have two light sources there is a lot of blending of the effects
2. Even a nice circular shape strobe produces a hot spot see Sea and Sea YS-250
3. A diffuser reduces hot spots and improves light fall off at the edges more than coverage angle
I shoot my strobes in a pool at a similar wall and I have no issue filling pretty much the whole frame. Take into account lenses have a lot of vignetting of their own so there is light fall off at the edges regardless of how good your strobes are. Some lenses exhibit up to 2 stops light fall off so you get 25% even with the sun let alone strobes.
The Ikelite in that report is a good example of a strobe that did not really benefit from a diffuser in the first place.
I am always puzzled on how people are sensitive to issues like coverage angle and hot spots in real life the times you have a hot spot is because with a non flat target you had something closer to the strobe and you did not manage to adjust
This strobe from Marelux regardless of any other parameter will require a diffuser like the Sea and Sea YS-110 in that example nothing you can do about it but also nothing to particularly worry about it as with 6200K most people will want to take that down to 5000K
