Review on Aputure Amaran AHL HN100 Flash Camera by Mark Jefferson

I was skeptical about the quality of this ring light but other reviews have convinced me that this is a quality product. I followed my intuition. It's cheap Chinese junk, about $5 worth. It's made entirely of thin plastic, except for a tiny bit of metal at the base of the hot shoe mount. First, the thin 77mm plastic adapter ring (the largest in the pack) is extremely difficult to mount directly onto the lens. After some fiddling I was able to screw it on and mount the ring light on the outside of the lens. Imagine my surprise when I found that the ring of light was clearly producing a heavy vignette on all of my photos - at the 28mm wide-angle setting (vignetting was to be expected) and at 85mm. Because of this, the 77mm lens mount is completely useless. The ring is too small to fit on a large lens without ruining every shot. Then I mounted the ring on the hot shoe and took a few shots. The color was of course in order - there were no foreign shades to be seen. The problem is that the ring emits a very wide light (like a spotlight) at a short distance. This wide light is abruptly cut off at the bottom of the photos as the lens blocks the way down, throwing the bottom of the photos into the shadow of the lens. This ring light has a silly design. Don't waste money. Better to use a traditional hot shoe with a small softbox diffuser.