Smallrig softboxes

scottishmonkey

scottishmonkey

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Anyone had any experience of these? Similar price point to Lencarta etc but no idea about quality
 
A US website selling rebranded Godox stuff.
Can’t see it being of much interest to a largely U.K. audience.
 
Phil V said:
A US website selling rebranded Godox stuff.
Can’t see it being of much interest to a largely U.K. audience.
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Or to anyone who wants decent quality softboxes . . .
 
Lencarta are decent? Seems the forum passively endorses them through the soft box tutorial?

And Godox seem to be doing good things with strobes and speedlights
 
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acrobatic_Citron said:
Lencarta are decent? Seems the forum passively endorses them through the soft box tutorial?
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Yes, they are. For a medium market solution.

If you'd been here longer then you'd know that:

a) This forum has had a long association with them

b) Garry used to be their technical expert for a couple of hundred years and a paid up forum sponsor/advertiser, before he retired

and

c0 They've contributed a huge amount of value to the group over the past decade or so.
 
acrobatic_Citron said:
Lencarta are decent? Seems the forum passively endorses them through the soft box tutorial?

And Godox seem to be doing good things with strobes and speedlights
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With lights yes, with softboxes not so much

DemiLion said:
b) Garry used to be their technical expert for a couple of hundred years
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Bluddy cheek:) I'm only 77. . .
 
LongLensPhotography said:
Cheaper end godox are actually fine. Some may need mods but nothing too crazy. The fancier easy open models are far more questionable
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IME recent Godox folding softboxes, 'dishes' and grids are better built than the Lencarta ones I bought 3-5 years ago. The design may have changed since; I haven't been back to buy more.

Performance wise it seems to depend on the exact model. Some are better, some are worse, some the same.
 
What we all need to understand is that softboxes are generic items, made in factories that don’t understand what softboxes actually do, they simply make things that are easy to make and sell because there’s a low entry barrier (no need for expensive machinery or skilled labour). There must be untold thousands of small factories and workshops that do this.

Most of these cheap softboxes are sold to people who don’t know better, and they’re probably happy with them because of this, but they’re cheap for a reason – usually very badly designed, made from the cheapest possible materials and totally incapable of diffusing the light properly, of controlling light spill, focussing the light and even, in many cases, of even tilting properly.
The irony here is that most of these junk softboxes are sold to people who work in tiny, white spaces that need really good softboxes:) Even very poor softboxes will work (up to a point) in large, black studios but they're useless in small spaces.

And there are a couple of really large, specialised factories too, in the same town, and which directly compete with each other. I used to deal with one of these factories, they make products from the very worst and cheapest to the very best and most expensive. Many are own-branded or unbranded, but the better ones are branded, e.g. Lencarta. This same factory used to make the Bowens softboxes, which were excellent, made from the same materials as Lencarta but at 3x the price!

And their biggest competitor used to make (and may still do) the ones branded Profoto.

The very best diffusers come from Vietnam, and so do the softbox walls. The rest come from China, much cheaper but wafer-thin and totally unfit for purpose. Most of the softboxes designed for flashgun (fixed reflector) use are cheap and nasty, but the light distribution problems created by fixed reflector lights require the very best designs and the very best materials.

It isn’t just the manufacturers that need to offer a wide choice of softboxes of different qualities, retailers have the same problems, so many also offer both good and cheap products, to cater for their wide range of different customer budgets and expectations.

Here’s a quote from my tutorial on softboxes, https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/tutorials/which-is-the-right-softbox-for-you.154/

“The next generation came out in about 1979 and had improved so much that they were unrecognisable. An American Company, Chimera, made them from fabric tent materials instead of steel and found a way of attaching a flash head to them. The Chimera softboxes look very similar to the ones that we use today. They were a brilliant advancement and suddenly, softboxes were both affordable and easy to use.

But, they were hand-made from good quality materials and they weren’t exactly cheap. The design was then copied and re-copied, time and time again, especially in China, by factories that are not run by photographers, and they became cheaper and cheaper, using terrible materials that fall to bits, don’t control the light spill properly and with diffusers that don’t diffuse properly. These terrible copies are still available today, and they are useless.”

And then there are a few very expensive, specialised softboxes, for example the so-called Parabolic Softboxes that make wild claims about their quality and/or benefits. They're just a waste of both money and space, but again some people buy them and retailers pretty much need to offer them for sale. See this video by Karl Taylor

acrobatic_Citron said:
Lencarta are decent? Seems the forum passively endorses them through the soft box tutorial?

And Godox seem to be doing good things with strobes and speedlights
Click to expand...
The forum doesn't endorse Lencarta in any way. That article was written by me as an individual, not by Lencarta and the only reason that it shows Lencarta products is that I took the photos and so own the copyright.
 
All interesting but does anyone have actual experience of Smallrig softboxes?
 
scottishmonkey said:
All interesting but does anyone have actual experience of Smallrig softboxes?
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They’re in the USA, we’re largely a U.K. forum.
If they’re similar to Lencarta at a similar price, why would a U.K. customer pay the postage and extra taxes to import?

If you’re in the US then you might have to find a lighting forum in the US, where there’s more likely to be someone with experience of them.

If your not in the US, why would you import something when you could buy a similar product here?
 
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Garry Edwards said:
Interesting . . . 12. Amazon reviews, all 5 star, but only two are actual purchases, the rest look like fakes.
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May well be. I would not expect that to be a popular product given the price tag. Small rig are better known for making CNC machined accessories like handles or brackets for gimbals, cameras. So softboxes are likely a private label rebrand...
 
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