Softboxes

Livin The Dream

Livin The Dream

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So I have a number of different brands but not totally happy with my octa plus grid. My favourite is a 100cm rotalux but the real drawback is lack of grids, unless you have money to burn. I have a couple of chiaro lencarta's which I find better quality than a couple of Bessell's I also have. I prefer the grids on the lencarta, the Bessel grid in comparison is poor. The walls of the chiaro boxes are far better than the Bessel too.
So i want a decent octa with a decent grid. The lencarta profold look very similar to the Bessel, are they better build quality? Is the grid better?

For my general work at home in tight spaces I have a mix of sizes from 60-100cm. I noted Gary say that any larger wouldn't be a benefit in a typical home environment? Would I see a benefit going 120cm over the 95cm or is the size going to be too much hassle?
 
Have you got time to wait till the Photography show, so you can compare them yourself in a single day?
 
That's not a bad idea at all Phil. It's been probably 4 years or more since I last went. Just up the road from me too, when is it?
 
Thanks Simon have been looking at the lineup. Think I shall pop along.
 
Livin The Dream said:
So I have a number of different brands but not totally happy with my octa plus grid. My favourite is a 100cm rotalux but the real drawback is lack of grids, unless you have money to burn. I have a couple of chiaro lencarta's which I find better quality than a couple of Bessell's I also have. I prefer the grids on the lencarta, the Bessel grid in comparison is poor. The walls of the chiaro boxes are far better than the Bessel too.
So i want a decent octa with a decent grid. The lencarta profold look very similar to the Bessel, are they better build quality? Is the grid better?

For my general work at home in tight spaces I have a mix of sizes from 60-100cm. I noted Gary say that any larger wouldn't be a benefit in a typical home environment? Would I see a benefit going 120cm over the 95cm or is the size going to be too much hassle?
Click to expand...
The reason that I don't recommend large softboxes in small spaces, apart from the amount of space that properly designed ones take up (they're generally much deeper than the cheap ones) is that, for most well lit shots, the softbox tends to be very high. With a low ceiling, large ones simply can't get high enough, or at least they can't if the subject is standing up. IMO, 120cm is too big for the average size room.

As for quality, there are many factors to take into consideration and it can be difficult to assess a particular softbox without a lot of experience and without actually trying it out, so I'm not sure how much you will gain from looking at different softboxes on different stands at a show.

The reality is that a very large percentage of all softboxes (regardless of brand and including even very expensive brands) are made in the same factory, and the factory is capable of producing every level of quality. But they make them to different standards, and from different materials, and to different designs, for different customers. The cheap ones tend to be shallow, the inner diffusers tend to be too far forward, have too large a gap around their outside and tend to be made of the thinnest possible plastic material, and the outer diffusers are usually made of the same cheap stuff. If the walls are too thin, then light will leak out of the back, reducing contrast and sometimes creating visible lens flare
 
Garry Edwards said:
The reason that I don't recommend large softboxes in small spaces, apart from the amount of space that properly designed ones take up (they're generally much deeper than the cheap ones) is that, for most well lit shots, the softbox tends to be very high. With a low ceiling, large ones simply can't get high enough, or at least they can't if the subject is standing up. IMO, 120cm is too big for the average size room.

As for quality, there are many factors to take into consideration and it can be difficult to assess a particular softbox without a lot of experience and without actually trying it out, so I'm not sure how much you will gain from looking at different softboxes on different stands at a show.

The reality is that a very large percentage of all softboxes (regardless of brand and including even very expensive brands) are made in the same factory, and the factory is capable of producing every level of quality. But they make them to different standards, and from different materials, and to different designs, for different customers. The cheap ones tend to be shallow, the inner diffusers tend to be too far forward, have too large a gap around their outside and tend to be made of the thinnest possible plastic material, and the outer diffusers are usually made of the same cheap stuff. If the walls are too thin, then light will leak out of the back, reducing contrast and sometimes creating visible lens flare
Click to expand...

Thank you Garry for the explanation, that makes perfect sense regarding height. I actually work in the lighting industry (commercial, industrial etc) so fully understand the manufacturing situation in the Far East. I have one of the original rotalux designs and as you well know they are very shallow, and so have wondered how differently the deep octa works in principle as all my other boxes are much deeper. It's the plastic reflector material on the bessels that seem quite thin, the stitching emphasises this.
 
There are in fact ways of making shallow softboxes work fairly well, for example Bowens made their wafer series quite a lot of years ago, and because of the amount of effort, good design and very expensive materials that they obviously put into it, it worked extremely well for such a shallow softbox. It has since been discontinued. Chimera did something similar and a fairly well known company is currently working on a new design that will be a real improvement, but these design/manufacturing improvements will be applied to deep softboxes that are already pretty good.

Where the cheapies fail is that they aren't designed at all, they are just poor copies of poor copies of poor copies, and the objective is to make them as cheaply as possible. The very large manufacturer I mentioned is very capable in the sense that they can use whichever materials their trade customers want and can tool up to make any design, but of course it is left to their customers to make those decisions. The factory has a vast range of "standard" softboxes that sell at incredibly low prices, these are the ones that are sold on internet sites with unknown branding, and on seller websites, usually branded with the name of the seller. Because of this, you can see identical products with different names on them. The factory gate prices for these products is unbelievably low.

This of course is just a short answer, there are a lot of factors that make a softbox good or bad.
 
Denyerec said:
If anyone knows who the "fairly well known" company who's developing another shallow box is and is willing to comment, I'd love to know as that's of acute interest to me in the near future!
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As per my post, the new development is not on shallow softboxes - the cost of producing shallow softboxes that actually work is prohibitive.

And, at this stage, no comments, sorry.
 
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