Amaran Verge and Verge Max review: diffuse fill and key lights for your home studio

Many of us record video content from home, rather than in a dedicated studio. Available light from a window in your home office might add a key light to one side of your face, but the other side could lack detail due to harsh shadows. If the window is behind you, then your face could be in silhouette. Daylight also fluctuates in intensity and colour due to the time of day and the weather, causing your YouTube presentations to look inconsistent if you record them throughout the day. Artificial light from an overhead bulb can add unflattering shadows to your face and emphasise ‘baggy’ eyes. You need a third-party light source to help you look better on camera!

In a ‘real’ studio, you might mount a soft box onto a COB (Chip On Board) LED to create a diffuse spread of light that fills in shadows and creates a more flattering look. However, soft box attachments can be rather large, and in a home studio, you may not have the space to fit them in. I’ve tested and reviewed many studio COB LEDs, such as the Neewer AS600B 600W Bi-colour LED video light, and they are just too large and powerful for home use (and expensive too!)

The Amaran Verge and the Amaran Verge Max LEDs offer an effective way to get a consistent, flattering light source into a small home office. They are both flat panel lights, so they are far less deep and intrusive than a studio light with a bulky soft box attached. The Verge and Verge Max offer a diffuse ‘soft box’ look that will flatter your face and make product photos stand out from the crowd on eBay.

Amaran produces a wide range of lights, from powerful (and expensive) studio COB lights to more portable battery-powered tube lights that are suitable for lighting portraits and video on location. The Verge and Verge Max are part of their flat panel light collection, and they are more suitable for lighting in your home studio.

Amaran Verge & Verge Max: Specifications

Amaran Verge & Verge Max: Price

The Amaran Verge and the Verge Max vary in price due to their specifications. The Verge is a smaller flat-panel LED that adds a soft, bright wash of light to your face for the relatively inexpensive price of $79 / £92. The larger and more powerful Amaran Verge Max costs $259 / £259.

The Verge Max is expensive compared to the Verge, but compared to a COB light with a soft box mounted to it, the Verge Max is much more affordable, and it is far less intrusive due to its flat-panel design. The Verge Max also offers a much brighter and larger spread of soft, diffuse light, beaming out a blinding 6455 lumens compared to the cheaper Verge’s 2347 lumens.

Personally, I think that the Verge Max is too powerful for my small home office shoot requirements, and I rarely pushed it beyond 50% of its brightness intensity as it caused hot spots to appear on my face in the footage. The smaller, cheaper Verge was more than powerful enough to add a strong, wide, and flatteringly diffuse key light to my face, so that should be a more attractive and affordable purchase for lighting a home office shoot.

Amaran Verge & Verge Max: Design & Handling

Since I’m covering two lights in this review, I’ll start with a look a the smaller and cheaper Amaran Verge and then move onto the Verge Max. The Amaran Verge is a rectangular flat-panel LED light that’s reminiscent of a large iPad due to its black plastic frame and curved corners. Being of a certain age, it also reminded me of an old ‘Etch-a-Sketch’ device I had back in the 1970s, especially thanks to the two control knobs jutting out at the lower front of the device!

Instead of a screen, it has a white edge-lit LED panel that illuminates a wash of soft diffuse light when you press a power button on the lower rim of the frame. The two control knobs adjust colour temperature in degrees Kelvin (K) and Intensity (brightness) respectively. For a relatively small plastic panel, it is surprisingly heavy, weighing in at just over 2lbs. This gives it a sense of quality build.

The rear of the Amaran Verge has a ribbed plastic texture at the base, which makes the plastic panel LED easier (and therefore safer) to grip. Also on the rear is a rubber cover. When you peel that cover off, it reveals a V-shaped mount that’s designed to slide onto Amazon Light stands and stay secure thanks to the unique Amaran Verge Lock system. My Amaran Verge test unit didn’t ship with an Amaran Desk Stand, but fortunately, it also has a 1/4” thread socket in the middle of the base of its frame, so I was able to attach it to a very affordable Bilione Mic stand that I had lying about. The third-party Bilione mic stand had a ball head, so I was able to pan and tilt the Verge to direct its illumination. You can purchase the Amaran Verge bundled with an Amaran Desk Stand for an extra $30 or so.

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Let’s move on to look at the design and handling of the Amaran Verge Max. Well, for starters, it’s much bigger than the Verge in relation to width, measuring 22”. When the courier lugged a huge box out of his van, I was surprised at the size, especially since I’d taken delivery of the much smaller Amaran Verge a few days earlier. Despite having a much larger surface area for the LED panel, the 1.4” Verge Max is not much thicker than the 1.1” deep Verge!

The Verge Max is also much heavier than the standard Verge, weighing in at 3.66kg / 8.07lbs compared to the Verge’s lighter 940g / 2.1lbs. Fortunately, my Verge Max also shipped with a sturdy metal Amaran Verge Desk Clamp Stand (which will set you back by $65 if you purchase it separately). This desk clamp is essential as it is designed to take the weight of the Verge Max. I liked the silver finish of the metal desk clamp as it complemented the white plastic Amaran Verge Max. The stand and lamp look like something you might find in a hospital environment, with their clean silver and white lines and textures. There’s also a charcoal version of the Amaran Verge Max if you like a darker look.

Amaran Verge & Verge Max: Performance

I’m not a fan of assembling flat-pack furniture, but the Amaran Verge’s Desktop Stand was easy to put together. It comes with two poles that need to be attached together via a thread. Initially, the top pole wouldn’t screw into the thread attached to the bottom pole. After a bit of fiddling, I was able to detach the thread adapter from the lower pole, rotate it 180º, and then attach the two poles together as required. I was then able to attach the horizontal arm to the top of the stand and mount the large circular Amaran Verge Max to the stand’s arm. The stand was then secured to my desk by rotating the clamp at the bottom threaded screw.

The horizontal arm at the top of the stand has an Amaran Lock mount that ensures that the lamp will always stay attached. This involves a V-shape slot so the lamp can’t slide out of the clamp. There’s also a little spring-locking pin to stop the lamp sliding out of the locking mechanism. The horizontal arm can be rotated to point the Verge Max in any direction, and a hinge at the end of the arm enables you to tilt it up and down for extra directional control. The locking handle that makes the lamp stay in position once tilted needed a fair bit of tightening, but the heavy lamp stayed in place once tilted. Despite the weight and 22” width of the circular Amaran Verge Max, I felt completely safe and confident when pushing and tilting it into new positions, thanks to the well-designed and sturdy metal desk stand.

As a product reviewer, I often need to illuminate gadgets on my desktop for product photos. I usually dig out a tube light such as the Viltrox K90, but sometimes these battery-powered LEDs aren’t fully charged and cut out during my shoot. The Amaran Verge and Verge Max are powered solely by USB-C, so they’re not something you’d take on a location shoot. However, by plugging them into your home’s power socket, you can be sure that they will be on hand to illuminate a shoot at the press of a button, without worrying about charging them. Both LEDs ship with a relatively long power cable, and the Verge Max’s stand has two plastic cable grips to stop the cable from dangling. However, these plastic grips are only attached to the stand’s horizontal metal arm via an adhesive, so they are prone to falling off, which leads to a partially dangling cable. This is a small niggle, and it doesn’t affect the Verge Max’s performance, but I like to be thorough.

Both the Amaran Verge and the Verge Max are controlled via two knobs and a single on/off button. The left knob adjusts the colour temperature between a warm 2700K to a cooler 6500K, so you can make the LEDs match existing light sources or complement a cold light source with a warm one. The right knob adjusts the light intensity. The smaller Amaran Verge doesn’t have a display, so you can’t see precisely which brightness or colour temperature setting you’ve chosen. However, the bigger Verge Max’s little display does give you that information.

What’s really worth doing is downloading the free Amaran Desktop App. This enables you to control both LEDs via your smartphone, and you can dial in specific colour temperatures on both lights with a tap. Check out my supporting video to see the App in action. The app also unlocks a special animated lighting effects mode that you can’t control via the lamps’ buttons. This causes the Verge LEDs to flash like lightning or flicker to mimic a fire, for example. I’m not sure how useful special lighting effects are in a home studio set up, but it’s nice to have the option to trigger them via the app.

The Amaran Verge and Verge Max are fanless, so they will never produce any distracting fan noise to spoil your presentations. Both LEDs are easy on the eyes in that they are RGO-certified. They eliminate UV, reduce blue light, and deliver flicker-free light that’s soft on the eyes. In my test video, I used the Amaran Verge Max as a large soft key light - basically, it mimicked a window. The smaller Amaran Verge then acted as a fill light on the other side of my face. Being Bi-colour LEDs, I can use them to complement existing daylight from my office window, or mimic daylight in the evening by dialling them to 5600K.

Amaran Verge & Verge Max: Verdict

The Amaran Verge and Verge Max are well-built and nicely designed Bi-colour LEDs. Being flat-panel lights (just over an inch deep), they don’t take up a lot of space in a small home office, but they do more than enough light for a range of scenarios— from YouTube presentations to product photography! Indeed, I couldn’t take the Verge Max much above 50% intensity without blowing out highlights in the shot! The smaller Verge still kicks out more than enough light but doesn’t have the wider spread of the Verge Max.

The Verge Max has a tall stand, so it floats above your desktop and doesn’t get in your way, but it’s still close enough to hand so that you can pan and tilt it to fine-tune your lighting set-up without getting out of your office chair.

Being bi-colour lights, they can emit a wide range of colour temperatures on the Kelvin scale, but they lack an RGB LED’s ability to add more creative colours to your footage.

Alternatives

Joby Beamo Deluxe

This entry-level home studio LED lighting kit can elevate the production values of your ‘talking head’ video presentations. The larger diffuse key light reduces wrinkles by removing harsh shadows and the smaller RGB fill light can add a wash of creative colour.

Zhiyun Fiveray F100

If you need a light that works both on your desktop and on location, then this battery-powered LED wand will give you that option. Unlike the Verge models, this is an RGB light, so it can cast a wide range of creative colours as well as the usual Kelvin scale.