softbox or softlight

[Guest toddwj23]

Can someone tell me what the main differences are between a softbox vs softlight. thanks

[Guest Chainsaw]

Essentially a soft-light is a dedicated soft source lighting fixture while a soft box is a separate lighting accessory.

 

A soft-light is a tungsten filament incandescent lamp that is not a fresnel nor PAR nor open-face design. The double-ended bulbs for these fixtures rest in a small aluminum reflector and bounce their light onto a soft concave white surface (Best Boy White) that acts as the face of the lamp. Basically these lamps are self contained bounce sources. Soft-lights do not have barn doors but rather a large metal apparatus called an Eggcrate that provides some control and directionality to your soft source. It looks just like its namesake. These lights cannot be flooded or spotted. Soft-lights range in wattage from 650w to 8K. For any wattage over 1K you will have separate and independently powered 1K double ended bulbs, these larger wattage soft-light fixtures are sometimes known as Zip Lights.

 

Soft Lights

 

Soft boxes are merely lighting accessory attachments that by themselves do nothing, they need to be coupled with a separate lighting fixture to have any effect. Soft boxes can be mounted to any lighting fixture (save for Fluoro banks) but work best with PARs and Open Face fixtures. Soft boxes can either be bought or homemade. Chimera is a company that specializes in professional soft boxes and accessories. These are of course preferable over most homemade designs but they can become quite expensive as they increase in size. The homemade variety are usually constructed out of foam-core and faced with a heavy diffuse material such as Full Grid Cloth or even Muslin. These are occasionally called Croney Cones after the master cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth. In some instances a soft box can refer to a homemade frame (or enclosed box design) containing several incandescent bulbs wired to dimmers and covered with diffusion.

 

Chimera's and Soft Boxes

 

While these two items serve the same function, that of creating soft light, a soft box or Chimera can always be removed from a fixture if it lacks the desired effect, while a soft-light will always be a soft light. But a soft-light is much smaller and easier to rig than any given soft box. Neither is a right or wrong choice, it simply depends on what you need to accomplish the task at hand.