What are the good brands to get for Monolights?

[Gavjenks]

My point ultimately is not that everyone ever should buy alienbees. It is just a brand that along with profot, as you say TiredIron, are at two extremes (almost), to help prove a point: which is that "zomg it's so rugged and quality!" is often overemphasized to the point of clearly being uneconomical, it almost gets a little fetishistic.

And that's fine, in a way! I am guilty myself sometimes. But if so, at least call it what it is: sometimes you just want to have fancy toys that you can either brag about or polish lovingly with your microfiber cloth late at night with a wild grin on your face. Yet in reality, they might be pointlessly overbuilt or more luxury than you ever would need.

* Cars that can reach 200 miles per hour even though the speed limit is 55 almost everywhere.
* Houses that have rooms you don't know what to do with.
* Pens that can write in space despite the fact that you're definitely never going to go to space.
* ...and lenses or monolights that are built to survive mortar fire, despite the fact that all you're actually ever going to do with them is unpack them from a nicely padded box and put them motionless on a pole and then put them pack in a nicely padded box. Honestly, my monolights could be made out of cardboard and I'd still probably not break them.

If it makes you feel good, and you can afford it, then great. Do it. Be happy, I don't care. But don't pretend that it's actually "THE logical choice" or whatever, because when you get to the high end quality in anything, it's not practically logical or economical, pretty much ever.





Elinchrom and Bower are both great brands, and definitely do exist along a continuum in between Buff and profoto, yes, as you say. All fine choices, really, depending on what you want.

But at the end of the day? If you were actually a hyper logical robot out to make the absolute best money choice you possibly could, all factors considered? Honestly, I think you would make the most profits probably buying Chinese crap monolights, 2-3 more of them than you need at any given time, and simply expecting them to fail at some fairly quick rate, and yet still saving money even if 10 of them break, over the course of a decade or two. The fact is, you can buy 20+ crap Chinese strobes for one really nice brand. And if you use 3 lights? That's 60 Chinese strobes you could afford instead. Sorry, but in no realm of reality are you going to somehow break more than 60 Chinese strobes in any amount of time.

That doesn't mean that's what we should all do. There's real value in "not feeling bad about your equipment" in and of itself. But it's worth acknowledging, for context, that that's what you're paying for: happiness. KNOW what you are spending your money on, if you spend it: Largely just feeling good about your gear is a big chunk of the price tag, as much as real utility.

 

[table1349]

But at the end of the day? If you were actually a hyper logical robot out to make the absolute best money choice you possibly could, all factors considered? Honestly, I think you would make the most profits probably buying Chinese crap monolights, 2-3 more of them than you need at any given time, and simply expecting them to fail at some fairly quick rate, and yet still saving money even if 10 of them break, over the course of a decade or two. The fact is, you can buy 20+ crap Chinese strobes for one really nice brand. And if you use 3 lights? That's 60 Chinese strobes you could afford instead. Sorry, but in no realm of reality are you going to somehow break more than 60 Chinese strobes in any amount of time.

That doesn't mean that's what we should all do. There's real value in "not feeling bad about your equipment" in and of itself. But it's worth acknowledging, for context, that that's what you're paying for: happiness. KNOW what you are spending your money on, if you spend it: Largely just feeling good about your gear is a big chunk of the price tag, as much as real utility.

Yeah.....Good Idea.....Try that as a business model and come back and tell us how it works out for you. No lights, waiting on replacements etc. means down time. There is an old saying in business you might have heard before. "Time is money."

Successful business photographers use top quality gear for a reason and it has nothing to do with "being happy" or "fancy toys" or "bragging." They use top quality gear because it is all part of running a successful photography business. You think Ford or Chevy goes to Harbor Freight to buy their tool to build automobiles. You think Boeing buys Craftsman tools to build airliners? I have yet to see a furniture manufacture using Shop Smiths to build their lines of furniture. They all use top quality equipment and materials for a reason.

Frankly "being happy" or "fancy toys" or "bragging" all sound like veiled excuses for hiding equipment envy. The OP in this thread sounds like they know what they want and need and is asking advise for the equipment that meets those needs in the price range THEY HAVE SET. Not tough.

Tell us, in all those SWAG estimates you tossed up did you factor in the cost of lost business, damage to your business reputation from being unable to meet your business obligations and the extended damage that can cost a business?

 

[Gavjenks]

Yeah.....Good Idea.....Try that as a business model and come back and tell us how it works out for you. No lights, waiting on replacements etc. means down time. There is an old saying in business you might have heard before. "Time is money."

2-3 more of them than you need at any given time

I think you missed the critical point. You do have the equipment, you don't have any down time, because if you know you're buying a more likely to break unit, you buy backups. Several backups. if 2-3's not enough, get 5 backups, whatever. You're still saving $1000s even with 5 backups on hand.

So you have 7 cheap lights for $50 each (=$350).
Let's say one of them breaks on average every year. Occasionally maybe 2 or once in a blue moon 3 of them break all at once. Whatever, you have 5 backups, just whip em off the shelf and keep going in minutes, then replace with your 2 day amazon shipping after the shoot. No clients lost, no down time. Takes ten minutes, maybe $10 worth of your time to reorder and open the box.

Let's say you use this setup for 20 years = +20 more replacement lights and time spent ordering them = $1200.
Total cost for initial and upkeep = $1550. In other words, you're saving thousands of dollars over profoto still, especially if you would have gotten a backup one of those.

You think Boeing buys Craftsman tools to build airliners? I have yet to see a furniture manufacture using Shop Smiths to build their lines of furniture. They all use top quality equipment and materials for a reason.

This is an unfair analogy, because a finely crafted Japanese hand plane does a way better job than a $10 plane from Home Depot. It's a different choice there, because you can make better furniture with the more expensive one, and it will probably pay for itself. I dunno about the Chinese strobes' specifications, fine, but the alienbees and Einstein units from Paul C Buff, actually perform better in every way in terms of photographic specifications than the profotos do, despite costing 1/3 as much or less. The only advantage of the profoto version appears to be tanklike build quality, which doesn't give you better photos. It only makes it less likely to break.

And the Einstein unit can easily compete on breaking/reliability/downtime as well by simple means of redundancy. And it's SO MUCH cheaper that you can add more than one layer of redundancy and still save money easily. All before you could afford to get even 1 unit of redundancy in profoto.

So that leaves us with no apparent benefit of profoto at all (other than feeling happy about it). Not even a question of "is the money worth the slightly higher abilities that might make up the cost?" Nope, it's more money for lesser abilities in every way, which doesn't make sense business-wise.

A brief glance at the stats of Elinchrom and Bower suggest that the story is roughly the same there, just to a less dramatic degree.

 

[Gavjenks]

Also, Boeing and people like that have safety considerations on the floor. A unit failing means a person losing their arm to the broken rivet gun, or having a landing gear dropped on them, or whatever. So "let it break and use backups" ain't a good strategy for them.

Whereas alienbees being made out of plastic versus titanium alloy is at most going to cause the light to break when it hits something, or not. Nobody is losing an arm either way. So there's no worker's comp or lawsuits or ethics to factor into tool investments. In fact if anything, a big heavy metal tank light is more likely to injure somebody...

 

[tirediron]

Also, Boeing and people like that have safety considerations on the floor...

And so does the photographer. What do you think Mommy is going to do when that inexpensive MIC lightstand collapses and junior wears your AB on his melon in the middle of the shoot?

 

[Gavjenks]

Also, Boeing and people like that have safety considerations on the floor...

And so does the photographer. What do you think Mommy is going to do when that inexpensive MIC lightstand collapses and junior wears your AB on his melon in the middle of the shoot?

1) I didn't say anything about lightstands or whether expensive vs. cheap ones do their job better or which ones anybody should buy.
2) Any given lightstand is significantly more likely to fall with a profoto than an AB on it, since the profoto weighs twice as much and is more topheavy. And will cause more injury to little Timmy when it hits his dome, since twice the mass = more momentum.

 

[table1349]

Yeah.....Good Idea.....Try that as a business model and come back and tell us how it works out for you. No lights, waiting on replacements etc. means down time. There is an old saying in business you might have heard before. "Time is money."

2-3 more of them than you need at any given time

I think you missed the critical point. You do have the equipment, you don't have any down time, because if you know you're buying a more likely to break unit, you buy backups. Several backups. if 2-3's not enough, get 5 backups, whatever. You're still saving $1000s even with 5 backups on hand.

So you have 7 cheap lights for $50 each (=$350).
Let's say one of them breaks on average every year. Occasionally maybe 2 or once in a blue moon 3 of them break all at once. Whatever, you have 5 backups, just whip em off the shelf and keep going in minutes, then replace with your 2 day amazon shipping after the shoot. No clients lost, no down time. Takes ten minutes, maybe $10 worth of your time to reorder and open the box.

Let's say you use this setup for 20 years = +20 more replacement lights and time spent ordering them = $1200.
Total cost for initial and upkeep = $1550. In other words, you're saving thousands of dollars over profoto still, especially if you would have gotten a backup one of those.

You think Boeing buys Craftsman tools to build airliners? I have yet to see a furniture manufacture using Shop Smiths to build their lines of furniture. They all use top quality equipment and materials for a reason.

This is an unfair analogy, because a finely crafted Japanese hand plane does a way better job than a $10 plane from Home Depot. It's a different choice there, because you can make better furniture with the more expensive one, and it will probably pay for itself. I dunno about the Chinese strobes' specifications, fine, but the alienbees and Einstein units from Paul C Buff, actually perform better in every way in terms of photographic specifications than the profotos do, despite costing 1/3 as much or less. The only advantage of the profoto version appears to be tanklike build quality, which doesn't give you better photos. It only makes it less likely to break.

And the Einstein unit can easily compete on breaking/reliability/downtime as well by simple means of redundancy. And it's SO MUCH cheaper that you can add more than one layer of redundancy and still save money easily. All before you could afford to get even 1 unit of redundancy in profoto.

So that leaves us with no apparent benefit of profoto at all (other than feeling happy about it). Not even a question of "is the money worth the slightly higher abilities that might make up the cost?" Nope, it's more money for lesser abilities in every way, which doesn't make sense business-wise.

A brief glance at the stats of Elinchrom and Bower suggest that the story is roughly the same there, just to a less dramatic degree.

Horse manure!

Tell me, now many alien bees do you own? How many profotos, Elinchrom, Bowers, Norman, Hensel or any other brand of lighting do you own? Have you done your own tests? Hell have you even ever seriously used various brands of studio lighting or for that matter any serious use of any studio lighting?

You seriously think that this Alienbee will out perform this Elinchrom? The top end alienbee compared to the mid range Elinchrom.

Tell me what is your recipe for dealing with the infamous low power color shift issue of the Alienbees?

How many successful photograph business have you run or been part of? Was it your business model they used of throwaway equipment?

One last question. Which Paul C. Buff lighting, be it Alienbees, Einsteins or White Lightings cost $50 per unit or did you just SWAG some figures together again with out having a clue of the real costs?

Man I sure hope that Iowa school has a good supply of those Cowboy Studio, Alienbee quality Cognitive Psychology researchers on hand. There going to need em.

 

[Derrel]

OP: Here are my comments. Many people have ONLY owned Alien Bees, and they think highly of them, despite the grossly over-inflated model numbers the Buff lights typically use. A Buff-made White Ligtning 3200 is, as Buff's own site states, "1,320 Watt-seconds" at full power, and the flash output is approximately equal to a 300 Watt-second Speedotron flash unit with 65-degree reflector, and LESS than the same Speedotron flash with a 50-degree beam 11.5 inch reflector.

Alien Bees are meant mostly for use with umbrellas, and are low-cost lights that are the first, and ONLY, lights many people have ever used. They are low-cost, but the "Model numbers" are utter hogwash, and are grossly inflated to make buyers think they have a lot more "power" than they do have.

Bowens INVENTED THE FIRST monolight, and still makes good ones. Elinchrom is Europe and the UK's #1 brand. Calumet's monolights are on par with those two brands.

If you want "professional grade" monolights, I would look at the above three brands: Bowens, Elinchrom, Calumet.

The Einstein 640 is a nice unit, even though what Buff specifies as 600 to 620 Watt-seconds give about the same light output as a Speedotron M11 outputs at 250 Watt-seconds. Paul C. Buff - Expected Output

As you can see, Buff's White Lightning 3200 model, his site lists as producing 1,230 Watt-seconds at full power. His site lists the Alien Bees 800 as being " 320 to 330 Watt-Seconds at full power".

The Alien Bees 400 at full power is, "160-165" Watt-seconds at full power.

Plenty of bull**** in the majority of the Buff product line's model-naming strategy.

Flash "power" for indoor use is not that big an issue. If you need to "overpower the sun"

 

[Gavjenks]

Tell me, now many alien bees do you own? How many profotos, Elinchrom, Bowers, Norman, Hensel or any other brand of lighting do you own? Have you done your own tests? Hell have you even ever seriously used various brands of studio lighting or for that matter any serious use of any studio lighting?

I own two alienbees and an einstein. I don't own any of the others for precisely the reasons I am explaining here: I don't think they're worth the money. I HAVE used a profoto and a Bower before for a shoot, one while second shooting, and one just messing around with a friend's equipment. I found nothing particularly more pleasant or fluid or useful about working with either of them at all.

Yes they were noticeably sturdier and sleeker and tougher feeling. They also weighed about twice as much (as the alienbees, only a little bit more than einstein). That is all though.

Tell me what is your recipe for dealing with the infamous low power color shift issue of the Alienbees?

1) It's not that bad in the first place.
2) It rarely comes up, because I rarely want to dramatically change the power of the strobes during a single shoot, and I have tested to see at what levels the alienbees best match the einstein in cases where I want to use both.
3) If I am using only the alienbees together, and I do for some reason want to dramatically shift power, I could correct it in RAW conversion once to match and then just apply it to all the photos from the secon half of the shoot. It would take 5 minutes, tops.
4) The einstein is excellent and has no color issues I've ever seen in its color constancy mode. If I was using only those (still at 1/3 price of profotos and 1/2 price midrange strobes), I would never have any such problems at any power levels.

You seriously think that this Alienbee will out perform this Elinchrom? The top end alienbee compared to the mid range Elinchrom.

No, I don't think the elinchrom will outperform an einstein (which is what I would properly compare it to, not the B1600 which is very much an obsolete unit and a straw man IMO). It has narrower range, longer minimum duration (athletic shots or anything with motion at all, 1/2000 is not that powerful, there's a reason our nicer cameras are made go to 1/8000th), and most other stats look about equal.

Plus you're asking the wrong question anyway. It's not "will that Elinchrom outperform one Einstein?" It's "Will that one elinchrom outperform TWO Einsteins?" because that's what you can get for the same money.

1 is maybe debatable. The build quality might outweight the stats, and if Derrel is right about power levels, then maybe it has an edge there, etc. But two? No, absolutely not.

How many successful photograph business have you run or been part of? Was it your business model they used of throwaway equipment?

Full time? None (either way). How many full time businesses that used throwaway equipment as part of their business model have I been in in other industries? About 4. It's by no means a business strategy I just made up 5 minutes ago. It works just fine.

So long as nothing horrible happens when a piece of equipment fails, then there's nothing wrong with just allowing for units failing. This is NOT an appropriate business strategy if you're talking about high speed centrifuges, for example. if they fail they can kill everyone in the room. But if failure just means "oh the light stopped turning on, grab another one from the shelf and swap out," then it's fine.

One last question. Which Paul C. Buff lighting, be it Alienbees, Einsteins or White Lightings cost $50 per unit or did you just SWAG some figures together again with out having a clue of the real costs?

The cheap Chinese ones cost $50. The Einstein costs $500. I wrote out a scenario for both in different parts of the thread. Sorry about any confusion.
Einsteins probably make more sense, since the Chinese ones don't have all the features you might need like sufficient power or whatever (if they do, though, I would go for those probably). The plan for Einsteins is NOT to have 5 extras on hand. You only really need one extra of those, I'd say. They're quite nice. Significantly nicer than alienbees, which are themselves not at all "flimsy." You're not gonna have two break at once.

Man I sure hope that Iowa school has a good supply of those Cowboy Studio, Alienbee quality Cognitive Psychology researchers on hand. There going to need em.

I have no idea what this sentence means.

 

[Gavjenks]

Flash "power" for indoor use is not that big an issue. If you need to "overpower the sun"

Perhaps the numbers are lower than advertised, I can't tell you that personally.

But I can tell you that the Einstein is perfectly capable of overpowering the sun.

 

[tirediron]

Just out of curiosity Gav, how much is Mr. Buff paying you?

 

[Derrel]

Here's a great example about inflated Buff naming on their Alien Bees units.

Notice how the 2.4x more-costly Alien Bee 400 has a significantly LOWER measured flash output than a $99.95 Flashpoint 320M sold by Adorama?

Notice how the Flashpoint 620M outputs over a full f/stop MORE light than the Alien Bee 800?

Notice how the $99.95 Flashpoint 320 has output equal to or 1/10 stop more than the Alien Bee 800, which costs $279.95?



product review | adorama flashpoint studio gear | Clickin MomsClickin Moms

The above is why, for people who inquire about their first-ever studio flash units, I often suggest the $99.95 Adorama Flashpoint 320M, which is an AC-current OR DC-battery powered option that has HIGHER output than the Alien Bee 400, and equal or ever-so-slightly higher output than the Alien Bee 800.

In terms of buying Chinese-made lights like Alien Bees or Flashpointss, and looking at them as "disposable" or "throwaway" lights, for the past three years I've been telling beginners to buy the Flashpoints.

WIth the $99.95 Flashpoint 320M, buyers get MORE light output than the $249 AB 400, and MORE light than the $279.95 Alien Bee 800.

So...$99.95 versus $249.95 or $279.95.

 

[Gavjenks]

[edit: nevermind I read the chart wrong]

But anyway, yeah sure, the flashpoint 320M is probably a fine option for a planned throwaway light strategy. I'm guessing, since it is Chinese made and the B400 is not (don't know why you keep insisting on that), it's probably more likely to break down. But at less than half cost (and sure more light output), might very well be worth it.

Tough call, either way seems reasonable to me. I might have chosen differently if I'd seen the chart when i was shopping for my cheaper monolights. *shrug*

Just out of curiosity Gav, how much is Mr. Buff paying you?

I think it just happens to be at the top of the [utility / cost] curve from my research and experience (the Einstein that is, which now that I've gotten one is what I would definitely get more of if needed, not more alienbees). That's all.

 

[Derrel]

Why is that chart only in full f/stops? It implies they only rounded to full f/stops, which makes the data fairly useless. (one could be 0.45 and another one 0.55 and they'd be rounded a full stop apart).]

But anyway, yeah sure, the flashpoint 320M is probably a fine option for a planned throwaway light strategy. I'm guessing, since it is Chinese made and the B400 is not (don't know why you keep insisting on that), it's probably more likely to break down. But at less than half cost (and sure more light output), might be worth it.

Tough call, either way seems reasonable to me. *shrug*

Just out of curiosity Gav, how much is Mr. Buff paying you?

I think it just happens to be at the top of the [utility / cost] curve from my research and experience (the Einstein that is, which now that I've gotten one is what I would definitely get more of if needed, not more alienbees). That's all.

Take a look "genius"...f/18 and f/10 are not "full stops".

Try a little harder.

 

[Gavjenks]

I already edited my post while you were writing that.