AiXPi Ring Light 10" review: illuminate your vertically and horizontally oriented videos

One of the easiest ways to improve the quality of your ‘talking head’ smartphone video footage is to add an LED light to your setup. In low light, your smartphone-sourced video footage may suffer from noise artifacts or look fuzzy and pixelated. The AiXPi Ring Light 10" offers a highly affordable way to give your smartphone camera much more light to work with, leading to better-looking footage and higher production values.

I’d not tested and reviewed an AiXPi product before, but this China-based company produces a wide range of ring lights, aimed at meeting the lighting needs of YouTube content creators and influencers without blowing their budgets. The AiXPi Ring Light 10" is designed to hold smartphones with a universal spring-clip mount, and it had no trouble holding my iPhone 17, even in its protective case.

But will this be enough to earn its place as worthy of inclusion in our best ring lights buying guide? Well, let's see!

AiXPi Ring Light 10": Specifications

AiXPi Ring Light 10": Price

The AiXPi Ring Light 10” officially retails at £24.99 on the Amazon UK website, though the official AiXPi Amazon Store was offering it for £16.95 at the time of writing, which makes it a more attractive purchase.

It is also available in a variety of alternative configurations, such as with a taller floor-mounted tripod, for a little extra. However, the AiXPi Ring Light 10” was listed as ‘currently unavailable’ on the US and Australian Amazon stores, suggesting that they are awaiting stock.

With its mixture of plastic and metal components, the phrase ‘you get what you pay for’ certainly applies to the AiXPi Ring Light 10". The illumination from the 120 LEDs in the 10-inch plastic ring does make a considerable difference to the quality of your video footage, but as we'll see below, I have concerns about the build quality, and the smartphone mount’s ballhead in particular.

AiXPi Ring Light 10": Design & Handling

The main component of the AiXPi Ring Light 10" is a ring constructed of a lightweight plastic ring mounted with 120 LEDs (light-emitting diodes). However, much of the kit is made of metal, including its tripod legs and the bodies of the two ball-head mounts that enable the ring light itself or a smartphone mounted within the ring to be tilted.

The LED ring light can be rotated through 360º on its ballhead mount, though you’ll most likely want to point it in the same direction as your smartphone. After tilting the smartphone on its mount, you need to tighten the ballhead’s hinge with a small plastic handle. This handle feels rather flimsy, and after rotating the mount to change my iPhone from landscape to portrait orientation and then back to landscape, I found that the ballhead had become very loose, and I struggled to tighten it back up again. While I eventually did get the ballhead tightened sufficiently to keep the phone in position, I’m not confident that this small but important tightening handle is built to last.

As the ring light’s LEDs are powered by a USB cable plugged into a power source, there’s no danger of the kit running out of power during a live streaming session, for example. The cable features a small control unit containing four buttons: an on/off switch, '+' and '-' buttons to toggle the LED brightness up and down in 10 increments, and a color temperature control that toggles between the unit’s three presets, achieved by turning separate cool or warm LEDs on or off to create a warm or cool mix.

There’s no way to dial in a specific color temperature in CCT values. The border of each button lights up when you plug the USB cable into a power source, though only the On and '+' buttons seem to illuminate.

AiXPi Ring Light 10": Performance

To test the AiXPi Ring Light 10”, I placed it on my desktop and connected it via its USB-C power cable to my MacBook Air. As you’ll see from my supporting video, I started the test by talking to my MacBook’s built-in FaceTime HD camera using available light from my office window to illuminate my face. The footage looked flat-lit, slightly soft, and had low contrast.

By popping my iPhone 17 into the universal smartphone spring mount in the centre of the ring light, I was able to send a wireless feed from the iPhone to my Mac (courtesy of the QuickTime app, which I used to make the supporting video for this review). This iPhone footage was far superior to the clips captured by my MacBook’s built-in camera, with a higher contrast, more vibrant colours and sharper details. I then tapped the On button on the AiXPi’s cable to fire up the 120 LEDs within the plastic ring surrounding my iPhone. By default, the illumination was too bright to look at comfortably, so I tapped the '-' button to dial down the intensity of the LEDs by a few increments.

The daylight from my window was a little cool, so I was able to toggle between the ring light’s three colour temperature increments to get a compromise between the warm tungsten interior light of my office and the cooler daylight from the window.

To start with, I mounted my iPhone horizontally, so that it was filming me with its superior back-facing cameras. The iPhone’s display wasn’t visible to me, but I could monitor the composition of my face (and check exposure and color temperature) as the iPhone’s footage was being fed wirelessly to my MacBook’s display.

I then decided to record directly onto the iPhone’s front-facing camera in portrait mode. This involved removing the iPhone from the LED’s clip mount, then removing the mount itself and re-attaching it via a different screw socket. I also had to loosen the smartphone holder’s ballhead so the holder could tilt by 90º, enabling me to place the iPhone in a vertical position. Many social media content creators will want to shoot vertically, so this was an important part of my test. However, as I mentioned in the handling section, the smartphone holder’s ballhead can become very loose, and it takes a bit of time to get it tight enough to hold the phone in a specific position.

AiXPi Ring Light 10": Verdict

The AiXPi Ring Light 10” can make a considerable improvement to the quality of your selfie footage; however, you are very limited in adjusting its color temperature to complement the available light. An adjustable ballhead enables you to orient your ring light-mounted smartphone to shoot in portrait or landscape orientation, but the flimsiness of its tightening handle doesn’t bode well for the product's longevity. I feel that the smartphone mount’s ballhead is the Achilles’ heel of this otherwise effective and highly affordable ring light.

Alternatives

If you prefer to shoot away from your desk, the Godox Litemon LR30Bi is a highly portable iPhone LED ring light that is well worth a look. It also has more colour temperature adjustment presets, enabling you to toggle accurately between CCT values of 2800K, 3200K, 4500K, 5600K, and 6500K.

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.