Godox Litemons LR30Bi review: soup up your smartphone selfies

Smartphones, such as the iPhone 17 (with its 18MP front-facing camera), enable filmmakers to capture high-quality video clips or portraits. When shooting in low light, however, your clips and photos may be blighted by picture noise caused by the camera’s need to use higher ISO speeds. Some smartphones use computational processing in an attempt to hide noise in clips and stills, but this can result in a loss of detail.

The Godox Litemons LR30Bi offers an effective solution to recording smartphone footage in low-light locations. It’s a highly portable mini ring LED that you can pop in your pocket and quickly attach to your smartphone to capture better-looking footage on the go. The best ring lights are often positioned so the lens shoots through the hole, for flattering all-around lighting that surrounds the subject, as well as producing donut-shaped catchlights in the eyes.

Godox has a long-established reputation for producing flash and continuous LEDs for photographers and videographers. I’ve reviewed several Godox-branded LEDs for Digital Camera World, such as the ML80Bi, and that particular model has become my ‘go-to’ LED when shooting professional portraits on location. The smaller and cheaper LR30Bi ring light is aimed at the consumer market, so it will suit travel vloggers who need to add extra light to their selfies without lugging around a heavy LED panel.

Alongside the LR30Bi, I was also given an additional LED panel to test – the Litemons LR15Bi. This mini LED is cleverly designed to complement the LR30Bi, and is well worth adding to your smartphone lighting kit, as I’ll explain.

Godox Litemons LR30Bi: Specifications

Godox Litemons LR30Bi: Price

The Godox Litemons LR30Bi will only set you back around $25 / £23 / AU$46, so buying one is a no-brainer given the improvement it will bring to the production values of your smartphone selfie footage, especially in low-light locations. It’s not the brightest LED on the market, but it doesn’t need to be, as it is designed to be mounted on your handheld smartphone a few inches from your face.

If you do need a boost in light intensity, then an additional cost of $16 / £14 will enable you to slot the LR15Bi into the body of the larger LR30Bi. This combined output from the LR15Bi and the LR30Bi raises their intensity from 48 to 77 Lux (when set to 6500K), giving you more light without blowing your budget.

Godox Litemons LR30Bi: Design & Handling

After unboxing the Godox LR30Bi, the my first impression was how remarkably light it felt, which indeed it is, at a mere 83g. Its cream body is constructed from plastic, which is no surprise given its affordable price. The LEDs are mounted within a circular white plastic ring, which will fit comfortably in the palm of your hand.

As its name indicates, this is a bi-colour light, so you can change the color temperature of the LEDs to complement existing light sources on location. Pressing the CCT/On button fires up the LEDs in the ring. You can then press the same button to quickly toggle between five color temperature presets in degrees Kelvin, from a warm candlelight-emulating 2800K, through an average daylight setting of 5600K, to a cooler 6500K. The adjacent Dim button toggles between five brightness level presets.

At the base of the unit is a clip to attach the ring light to any smartphone. The clip has a hinge that enables the LED ring to be tilted and even rotated by 180º to illuminate a subject at the rear of your camera instead of shooting a selfie. At the centre of the LR30Bi’s LED ring is a mini mirror designed to help you compose a selfie using your smartphone’s superior rear-facing cameras. Intriguingly, this mirror can be removed and replaced by the smaller (separately sold) Godox Litemons LR15Bi. More on that modular feature in the next section…

Godox Litemons LR30Bi: Performance

To test the Godox LR30Bi, I hired a model, Antonia (Instagram: @antonia_sabato), whom I met in the Shad Thames area of London. This location features small alleyways full of interesting brickwork that make a great backdrop to an urban portrait shoot. However, these alleys tend to be quite gloomy, so my iPhone portraits can suffer from computationally processed smoothing artifacts that look a bit pixelated. As well as providing extra light that assists the camera in capturing more detail, the LR30Bi also adds a catchlight to the model’s eyes, which helps bring portraits to life.

Since the LR30Bi is primarily a selfie LED, I popped it onto my iPhone 17 and gave it to Antonia to test out. She started by using the iPhone’s front-facing camera to capture some selfies and was able to compose her shots using the iPhone’s generous 6.3in display. A couple of taps on the CCT button enabled her to make the ring light’s output complement the daylight that was entering the location from her left. So the sun provided a key light, while the LR30Bi filled in the harsh shadows and added a sparkle to her eyes.

The rear cameras on the iPhone 17 can capture a higher resolution, so Antonia was able to rotate the iPhone to use those cameras and rotate the LR30Bi 180º on its hinge so that it continued to light her face. She could check that she was still in shot by referring to the selfie mirror mounted at the centre of the LED ring. Thanks to the iPhone 17’s open-gate sensor, she could shoot selfies in portrait and landscape orientation without needing to rotate the iPhone (though the LR30Bi’s spring clip does enable you to fix the light to a horizontally or vertically held smartphone).

To add extra light to the location, I replaced the LR30Bi’s selfie mirror with the optional LR15Bi LED. This combination of the docked LEDs boosts the unit’s output from 48 to a maximum of 77 lux (when set to 6500K). The modular design of the LR30Bi and the LR15Bi is very clever. When the two are docked together, you can use the main unit’s CCT and Dim buttons to consistently adjust the color temperature and intensity of both LEDs simultaneously.

Another useful design touch is that both lights feature magnets. The smaller LR15Bi has two strong magnets on its rear. I was able to clamp it to a rail next to Antonia and add a little rim lighting to the side of her face (instead of flat-lighting her from a camera-mounted LED). The mirror at the centre of the LR30Bi also has a magnet, so I was able to clamp the brighter LED to the same rail to boost the intensity of the side light.

The specs for the LR30Bi claim a battery life of one hour and 15 minutes. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was enough to illuminate Antonia on our two-hour test shoot, bearing in mind that it was turned off between different setups. If you do need to light it for longer, you can always charge it up from a power bank via its USB-C socket while you take a coffee break.

Godox Litemons LR30Bi: Verdict

The Godox Litemons LR30Bi is an essential accessory for travel vloggers who need to talk to the camera in a range of locations, especially in low light. Its affordability and portability should make it an attractive purchase, and the extra light that it casts on your smartphone-sourced selfies should lift your production values above those of your peers who are only using available light (and those improved production values might earn you a few more YouTube subscribers).

The modular nature of the LR30Bi makes the smaller and cheaper LR15Bi a sensible addition to your LED selfie kit, as it almost doubles the output of your smartphone-mounted light source.

Alternatives

If you need a larger ring light to enhance your desktop-set video recordings, the AiXPI 10-Inch Ring Light won’t blow your budget. Despite its larger size, it is marginally cheaper than the more portable Godox LR30Bi but provides more limited control over color temperature settings.

Pitched at content creators and YouTubers, the Rotolight Ultimate Vlogging Kit is easy to set up and straightforward to use. Mounted on a mini tripod, the twin accessory bar has screw clamps for attaching the phone and light ring side-by-side.