A dedicated painting lamp is one of the best investments you can make as a model painter, whether your goal is to paint competition winning display miniatures, to secure 10 points at your next Warhammer 40k tournament by rocking up with a fully painted army, or simply save yourself from eye strain. Both I, and Wargamer's editor Alex, switched to dedicated painting lamps relatively recently in our hobby careers, and we haven't looked back. Here's our experiences with two models, the budget friendly Lucent, and the premium Redgrass R9.
While we discuss specific lamps, much of what we discuss here is the benefits you get from any dedicated painting lamp and why they're a great purchase for anyone whose hobby is painting miniatures. So if you're not convinced by the lamps we've tested, we encourage you to go and look for another option that suits you better.
Lucent
Alex Evans: I'm ashamed to say that, in the last decade, I've painted many hundreds of minis under either regular room lighting, or a crappy, 20 dollar desk lamp from Amazon. I regularly flirted with spending $200 on a fancy-pants, nine trillion lumen lamp recommended by one pro painter or another, but I always managed to restrain myself, telling myself it wouldn't make that much difference.
When Kit from Game Envy handed me a Lucent hobby lamp at Gen Con last year, I remained skeptical. At $85, it was around 30 bucks cheaper than the Neatfi XL (touted as the cheapest 'good' painting lamp) and less than a third of the 300 bucks you'd pay for the Redgrass R9, the connoisseur's choice. Yet its clever, posable spider-arms seemed to me a distinct advantage over both. How could the Lucent be so much cheaper than its rivals, when surely being able to pose four light strips freely around your model, manipulating shadows and such, trumps their extra brightness?
I've used both the Neatfi and Redgrass lamps at shows, and they are much brighter - 1600-2500 lumens and 1800 lumens respectively, compared to the Lucent's 1350. If you painted for ten minutes under one of the others, then switched to a Lucent, you'd notice the difference. One of the goals of using a proper painting lamp is to see every tiny detail of your model, and every pip of extra brightness helps.
But, in actually using the Lucent, I've learned that being as bright as a supernova really isn't the most important thing. Yes, brighter light equals sharper detail perception, but when it comes to painting minis, past a certain point, we care more about Color Rendering Index (CRI) - how accurately it shows you the exact colors you're putting on the model. On that score, the Lucent's 95/100 CRI is near-as-damn-it the same as the Redgrass' 98, and ahead of the Neatfi's 80. More to the point, once you're above 80, most people won't notice the difference anyway.
Meanwhile, I really have found the Lucent's posable arms superbly useful for lighting the mini from multiple specific angles at once. It's not an upgrade over the diffusion tech the other two use to get light all around your model, but it's a more than suitable replacement. Ultimately, buying one of these lamps is an exercise in spending as little money as possible to get the largest possible upgrade from the default, cheap ass desk lamp everyone has (mine was around 500 lumens and 70ish CRI). Other lamps, especially the Redgrass, are definitely a better upgrade than the Lucent - but I personally don't think they're better enough to splash the extra cash.
Redgrass R9
Tim Linward: I moved house in late 2024 and found myself in the luxurious position of outfitting my first ever dedicated home office and hobby space. I knew I would spend an awful lot of time painting miniatures here, and my previous lighting solution - two theatrical lamps I'd bought from Ikea - wouldn't hack it. If I was going to invest in an expensive lamp, I might as well get the expensive lamp, the Redgrass R9.
The Redgrass is endorsed by a lot of pro miniature painters, and what do you know, they know what they're talking about. As Alex explained above for the Lucent, the benefits of strong, simulated daylight are real. Under the Redgrass I can see the color and details of whatever I'm working on with great precision.
You don't have to be a pro painter to get an advantage from this. A lot of painting is a matter of hand eye coordination, and that's easier to train and execute when you can see exactly what effect your hands are having. Even basic things like seeing every detail on a small mini, or a mini with a black undercoat, are just easier.
The Redgrass has also proven extremely practical. It has a very good quality lever arm that clamps onto the back of my painting desk, so it takes up no space. That arm hasn't lost any tension since I started using it, and will stay pointing exactly where I want it pointed, while still being easy to shift into a new position. It also has a very wide swing arc, which allows me to swivel it over to my main computer desk if I'm ever painting while watching a video.
The lamp has two light bars which can be rolled independently towards or away from one another, giving you more focused or dispersed light. I tend to go with dispersed as this does a better job lighting the sides of the model, but for small details the focused beam is a boon. The power button can be held down to control the brightness, and there are use cases for slightly dimmer light, particularly when attempting to take photos with my phone camera (which suffers from tragically bad dynamic range).
There may be lamps that are equally good that I haven't tried, or lamps at a better price point that sacrifice very little quality like the Lucent. But I haven't ever regretted buying the Redgrass R9 or wondered where my money went - the quality is obvious. If you're in a position to comfortably afford one, it's a purchase I can recommend.
You can ask us follow-up questions in the Wargamer Discord community - and we'd love to hear from you if you've tried another excellent lamp, or can recommend another essential upgrade that made a big difference to the quality and ease of your painting.