Many video folks may not be as familiar with Smith-Victor as they are with companies like Arri or Lowell, or even smaller companies like Alzo, that are well known in the video/motion film lighting world. However, traditional still photographers are very familiar with Smith-Victor, as they are one of the dominant names in still photography lighting. A few years back, Smith-Victor decided to apply their vast knowledge of lighting to the motion world and have since released a number of video lights. Fortunately for our readers, these lights are substantially less expensive than most of their competitors!
More recently, Smith-Victor decided to enhance this cost-effective mentality by making a line of video lights with an even greater eye for economy called their KSB series. These are soft box lights which are designed to be used primarily as fill lights, where the diffusion that’s a part of the softbox shell disperses light evenly across a subject. These lights are designed to be easy to use, economical to acquire, and economical to continue using.
With these goals in mind, we immediately contacted Smith-Victor about reviewing their new set of lights. They kindly provided us with the two light setup of the KSB-1000. A single light setup is available as the KSB-500 and a three light setup is available as the KSB-1250 (which consists of two main lights and a softer 250W overhead softbox setup, for a form of three point lighting).
Ease of Use
If you’ve never set up a soft box before, opening up the box for one of the KSB lights may be a little confusing, as it looks almost exactly like you just opened up the box for a pup tent. Much like a pup tent, creating the rigging for a softbox is about bending tension rods into fabric pockets and then securing the outer shell around it. While I have been on shoots with soft box lighting, I hadn’t constructed one myself, so found it took a little bit of work to accomplish. (Our problems stemmed from the fact that we received a pre-production version of the KSB-1000 for this review which did not have instructions. All the production released versions have instructions in them as of press time, so I’m sure this won’t be an area of confusion by the time you read this.)
Once you get the soft boxes constructed, they’re a bit awkward to move around in an indoor setting, as their sheer size makes them a bit awkward to move through doorways. You can get them through, but it is a little bit of a pain. Because of the effort required to assemble the softbox, you may want to keep them assembled most of the time.
