Softboxes - Cheap vs. Expensive

I need 2 stripboxes and and octabox for my Speedotron Black Line heads. Now, I know this is going to be a pretty broad question, but what's the advantages of going with cheap vs. expensive. And by the way, cheap isn't necessarily cheap price wise.

E-bay has visico strip boxes with grids for about $100. The Photoflex equivalent would cost me about $170 for the box and about another $100 for the grid, iirc. For some one starting out, would a Visico box work? I've seen the coverage from the strobe and I'm guessing that the more expensive photoflex boxes would have less of a variation of exposure level over the face of the box.

Also, I'm looking at the Elinchrom deep octa, is it worth the several hundred vs. a cheaper one? Besides construction and the even-ness of the exposure on the face of the modifier, are there other things I'll be missing out on that I haven't taken into account?

Cheap Rules !!!
Make your own !!!

My 42" softbox cost $42.00. Works great and when the wind blows it over and it breaks....I just go buy another one .

Village_Idiot wrote in post #11484146
I need 2 stripboxes and and octabox for my Speedotron Black Line heads. Now, I know this is going to be a pretty broad question, but what's the advantages of going with cheap vs. expensive. And by the way, cheap isn't necessarily cheap price wise.

E-bay has visico strip boxes with grids for about $100. The Photoflex equivalent would cost me about $170 for the box and about another $100 for the grid, iirc. For some one starting out, would a Visico box work? I've seen the coverage from the strobe and I'm guessing that the more expensive photoflex boxes would have less of a variation of exposure level over the face of the box.

Also, I'm looking at the Elinchrom deep octa, is it worth the several hundred vs. a cheaper one? Besides construction and the even-ness of the exposure on the face of the modifier, are there other things I'll be missing out on that I haven't taken into account?

There's a thread around here somewhere where someone compared an Elinchrom Deep Octa to an SP Studio Solutions Deep Octa knock off ($120 from B&H) and the results were fairly similar.

Fotodiox and Visico are the exact same items, just different logos screened on them. They work fantastic and don't eat up your pockets. The built quality if you have to take them apart after every is not the finest. If you can leave them set up all the time they are fantastic. I added a large selection to my rent-able studio space just because of cost. If they get tore up, I'm not out alot of money to replace them.

I have cheap ones, and they didn't break yet... I think expensive softboxes are a ripoff, they cost only few bucks to manufacture...

I mix and match.

I have cheap generic strip boxes and a rectangular softbox.

I bought an authentic Elinchrom DO since I wanted the specific look of the DO.

So I splurged on the DO but went cheap on the strip boxes. I figure the strip has less of an impact on the look anyway.

Some of the cheap ones the grids are worthless IMHO. No personal experience with Visico brand in general. They look like AB boxes to me when I was shooting at a friend's place. Not bad for the price.

BTW - I would love to see DIY that some folks are suggesting.

I have one cheap softbox and the rest are "expensive"

I bought the cheap one first and after that I went with elinchrom. They are made better and easier to open and store.

I have a visico octobox. Its very well built, and performs very well.

I can tell you that the grid on cheap soft/strip-boxes tend to suck. They are poorly stitched so I've mangled one when trying to remove it from the softbox. Also, the grid wasn't very wide/deep so it didn't control light very well. I had to angle the softbox further away from the camera or bg or wherever I didn't want light to spill upon.