Harlowe x Adele Chan Sol 30 Spectra Creator Kit review: an eye-catching LED with a retro design

Harlowe (part of AEC Lighting Solutions Co. Ltd., a lighting company with more than 20 years’ experience) designs lights for photographers, filmmakers, and content creators. Formerly called Hobolite, the brand changed its name to Harlowe in October 2024. According to the company website, the name Harlowe "reflects a tribute to the Golden Age of Cinema" – perhaps evoking classic Hollywood actress Jean Harlow? This nod to classic cinema is appropriate, as most Harlowe lights are designed to have a vintage look, with brown vegan-leather panels blending stylishly with silver metal bodies.

Harlowe lights vary in cost, style, and size, from the portable Harlowe Sol 5 Spectra to the powerful and much more expensive Avant Max. The Harlowe Sol 30 Spectra Creator Kit has more in common with the Sol 5 Spectra than the Avant Max, in that it is a portable flat-panel LED. As its name suggests, the Sol 30 is a 30W LED, so it kicks out a brighter light than the older, smaller Sol 5. Both the Sol 5 and Sol 30 LEDs come with rather stylish carry cases, but with the Sol 30, Harlowe has gone one step further by collaborating with designer Adele Chan to create a distinctive retro-looking LED with a carry case that complements its vintage look.

Harlowe x Adele Chan Sol 30 Spectra Creator Kit: Specifications

Harlowe x Adele Chan Sol 30 Spectra Creator Kit: Price

The Harlowe x Adele Chan Sol 30 Spectra Creator Kit retails at $399.99 (other territories TBC). That might sound like a lot for a 30W LED, but with Harlowe products, you’re paying a premium for a beautifully designed light – and therefore paying designer prices.

There is also a 'Standard' Sol 30 kit that doesn't have the Adele Chan branding at $250, though this is merely a bi-color white light with a color temperature range of 2700–6500K, a plainer silver-gray and brown finish, and it comes in a far more basic carry pouch. Compare this with the 36,000 RGBCW colors and wider 1700–10,000K range of the Adele Chan edition, in its plush round carry bag.

If you compare the new Sol 30 with the older Sol 5, though, it actually looks like relatively good value for money. The smaller, less powerful Sol 5 sells for around $180, for a fairly measly 3W LED that can be boosted to 5W. The Sol 30’s 6.3-inch surface is also much wider than the Sol 5’s 2.7 inches, so you’re getting a much brighter, wider light source.

But even so, by including Adele Chan’s name in the title of the light, Harlowe is clearly pushing the 'designer' nature of the Sol 30 Spectra and charging a premium for it. So the questions you personally need to ask yourself, as with all 'designer' products, are: "Do I like the design?" and "Am I happy to pay a premium for it?"

Harlowe x Adele Chan Sol 30 Spectra Creator Kit: Design & Handling

On unboxing the Sol 30 Spectra kit, my first reaction was that this is a photography product with strong appeal to female buyers. My wife puts up with me playing with lots of photography gadgets in the living room and tends to ignore them, but on seeing the Sol 30’s dark green leather-look circular bag, with its brown faux-leather edging and chunky gold zips, her eyes lit up. She found the bag genuinely attractive. Chunky gold buckles attach, handbag-like, to a brown strap that can be worn across the body or slung over a shoulder. My model, Maddy, also expressed admiration for the Sol 30’s carry bag as soon as she saw it.

The feminine styling of the bag can be attributed to its designer, Adele Chan. Adele is Editor-in-Chief of NYLON Singapore, a digital magazine focusing on fashion, beauty, technology, travel, food, entertainment, art, and design, with a young, style-conscious audience. The collaboration with Adele is celebrated by her signature, engraved onto a gold panel on the front of the carry case alongside the Harlowe logo.

Adele’s fashion, photography, and visual-design credentials are a perfect match for the stylish retro design of Harlowe products and, as you’ll see from the supporting video in the Performance section, the carry case looks great slung over the shoulder of a glamorous model during a 'Bond girl'–style shoot.

But I’m using up most of this section’s word count talking about a carry case! Let’s move on to the light itself. My first impression on seeing the Sol 30 Spectra nestling in the soft, velvety interior of the carry case was that it complemented the design of the stylish bag while also looking unmistakably like a Harlowe product. The pine-green faux-leather panels matched the green of the case, while the raised gold body on the rear of the light, plus its two gold control buttons, echoed the gold detailing on the case’s zips.

The kit’s press release refers to the finish as "copper-toned metal", but to my eyes, it looked more like gold. That’s not a complaint! Lifting the light out of the case, its 1.27 lb (575 g) weight gave it a reassuringly substantial feel. However, the large raised section on the rear felt rather warm and plasticky, while the tactile ridged control knobs, thread-tightening knob, and cold-shoe mount felt cooler and more convincingly metallic.

The diffuser covering the LEDs on the front is plastic too, as you’d expect, but overall there seemed to be more plastic than metal in the Sol 30’s construction than I anticipated. Given the premium price, that was a little surprising – and slightly disappointing.

On the rear of the light, there is a circular gold mesh, with an "H" for Harlowe at the center. This reminded me of the grilles adorning old Tannoy speakers that you might have seen mounted on office or school walls in the 1970s, adding another nostalgic touch to a product range that excels at evoking a retro vibe. The rear of the light also features a color LCD screen that uses the same distinctive font found on other Harlowe products. I’ll go into more detail about controlling the light during a shoot in the next section.

Harlowe x Adele Chan Sol 30 Spectra Creator Kit: Performance

In previous Digital Camera World reviews, I’ve associated the retro design of Harlowe LEDs with classic Sean Connery Bond movies, so I was inspired to ask my model to dress up as a Bond girl for our location test shoot. The Sol 30 Spectra’s stylish retro case looked appropriate when slung over Maddy’s shoulder as she strode along the corridors of London’s 1960s Brutalist Barbican Centre. Indeed, the name Spectra even evoked Bond’s nemesis, SPECTRE. This inspired me to nickname her "Maddy the baddy" for the rest of the shoot.

As you’ll see from this section’s supporting video, the Sol 30 Spectra Creator Kit was the perfect accessory for our Bond girl. After unzipping the case and removing the light, Maddy had to press a button on the rear of the Sol 30. This activated a message on the color LCD screen instructing her to rotate a larger control knob to turn the LED panel on. This belt-and-suspenders approach prevents the light from accidentally switching on inside its case and draining the battery before a shoot. It’s a welcome design touch that appears across Harlowe’s LED range.

Dressed as a Bond girl, Maddy wore a leather garter containing a couple of knives for dispatching enemy agents. For the video review, I wanted her to remove a Manfrotto Pixi mini tripod from her garter and attach it to the 1/4-inch thread at the base of the Sol 30’s hinged lighting mount. The Pixi was a little too chunky to fit, so we cheated the garter gag in the edit! The Sol 30 also has a cold-shoe mount, so it can easily be attached to a conventional camera.

Maddy was then able to use the LED’s hingeable bracket (and the Pixi’s ball head) to point the light at her face and use her phone as a 'mirror' while applying some lipstick before continuing her mission. The Spectra’s 6.3-inch panel and 30W output provided ample illumination for her to work with in the gloomy corridors of the Barbican.

After filming the video section of my shoot, I used the Sol 30 Spectra to help illuminate the portrait stills that accompany this review. I’d brought along an Avant Max Spectra as my key light, which I set to a warm color temperature that complemented the location’s artificial light sources.

I placed the Sol 30 on top of a wall to the left of Maddy and set it to a contrasting cool-blue color temperature. This added a little modeling fill light that helped sculpt a more three-dimensional portrait of Maddy, rather than using a camera-mounted light source that would have produced a bland, flat-looking face.

Having these lights in the dark corridors of the Barbican was essential. As well as 'sculpting' the model with key and fill lights, the Harlowe LEDs also enabled me to use a faster shutter speed, which meant that few of my portraits suffered from motion blur as the model changed from one pose to another.

The Sol 30 Spectra is easy to control. You can use its two main knobs, which also function as buttons, to dial in a color temperature between 1700K and 10,000K. Alternatively, switching to RGB mode gives you a rainbow-spectrum display on the color LCD. Simply rotate a knob to dial in a wide range of more creative colors. Some hues, such as vibrant reds, can cause detail to disappear in a portrait, but you can easily switch to Saturation mode to dial down the intensity of any color.

You can also connect your smartphone to the Harlowe app and control the Sol 30 Spectra’s settings from your smartphone’s larger screen.

Harlowe x Adele Chan Sol 30 Spectra Creator Kit: Verdict

The Harlowe x Adele Chan Sol 30 Spectra Creator Kit is certainly one of the more stylish LED lights I’ve tested. Its retro green-and-gold design and beautifully made carry case give it a distinctive identity that helps justify its premium price, especially if you value how your kit looks as much as how it performs.

Fortunately, the Sol 30 isn’t simply a triumph of style over substance. Its 30W output and relatively large 6.3-inch panel make it a useful portable light for both photography and video, while the broad color-temperature range and RGB controls provide plenty of creative flexibility. I found it particularly effective as a colored fill light alongside a more powerful key light, and its straightforward physical controls make it quick to adjust on location.

You are undoubtedly paying extra for the Harlowe design aesthetic and the Adele Chan collaboration, and photographers who simply want the most light output for their money will find cheaper alternatives. But if you want a compact LED that performs well, is enjoyable to use, and looks rather fabulous while doing so, the Sol 30 Spectra has plenty of appeal.

As I’d like to identify more with Connery’s Bond, I’d prefer the 'big gun' of the more powerful Harlowe Max Spectra RGB LED. But if you’re more of a Moneypenny who likes to travel light – and in style – then you’ll probably be eyeing up the Harlowe x Adele Chan Sol 30 Spectra.

Alternatives

The Harlowe Sol 5 Spectra is a smaller, less powerful alternative to the Sol 30 for smartphone creators. Its premium aluminum construction and faux-leather detailing give it the same stylish finish as larger Harlowe lights. Its output is modest at 3W, with a temporary 5.5W boost, but it’s effective for close-range filming and can noticeably improve low-light smartphone footage.

If you don’t need a 'designer' flat-panel LED, then for less than half the price of the Sol 30 Spectra, you can get hold of the Zhiyun Fiveray M60 Ultra. And as a bonus, it’s more powerful at 60W output (instead of the Sol 30’s 30W). It has full RGB functionality too, making it an attractive alternative.