Review on 📸 Fovitec 3-Light Fluorescent Studio Lighting Kit with Boom Arm, 20x28-inch Softboxes, 11 45W Bulbs, Light Stands, and Carry Case for Portraits, Product Photography, Vlogging, Video Conferencing, and Live Streaming by Steve Albright

(This review is for the 3x lighting set.) GENERAL: This is a very working set for first studio lighting; the best I found in a few days of searching the web. I am still happy with this purchase after 1 year. I would give it 4 stars for user experience, but a fair comparison of options for cost puts it at 5 stars (see below). PRICE: excellent value for money. Especially in terms of quantity and quality of light per dollar. PORTABILITY: First, no kit with comparable light quality is very portable. Of course, single LED lights are much more portable, but they fall far short of the light quantity or quality of this phalanx of CFLs. And secondly, this kit is so affordable that you can't expect a professional storage system. The two most difficult aspects of assembling and disassembling this kit are: [A] Installing the teeth in the shrouds is very difficult; Set aside some time when you feel patience and take time to practice it; it can be mastered, [B] handles all 11 CFLs; not annoying, just repetitive. (Systems that replace multiple bulbs with just one cost a ton more money and tend to have heat issues.) - Conclusion: I'm using this as a mobile kit, but BUDGET TIME for it. CONSTRUCTION: No. Complaints. For the money these shelves are good. Of course not professionally. But light durable enough for lamps. These aren't reliable camcorder tripods, but they don't have to be. I've had this set for about a year. I assume they should withstand respectful use (i.e. hands-free users) for a few to many years. QUALITY AND AMOUNT OF LIGHT: They emit light. You can change the number of lamps (using switches), add zero, one or two partitions and, of course, reduce the distance to the object. Lamps with a CRI of 90+ worked great for my use (mainly for videos and some product photos). CONSTRUCTION: Tripods offer many options for placing light sources: height and two axes of rotation. Two 5-segment lamps allow you to turn on 1, 3 or 5 lamps with switches. There are two additional baffles for each hood (mid depth and front). The spikes that expand the hoods are difficult to insert, especially the first few times. It's good to have a crossbar and counterweights for the edge light. (I've used water bottles as a counterweight; they're always on hand, easy, and don't cost anything to adjust the mass as needed). ALTERNATIVE KIT TYPES: Beginners will compare this kit to flash lights and umbrella flashes. For my work with video, these were failures. But I also prefer them for my photographic work, because you can already see the lighting when you set up the frame and not only when looking through it after the picture has been taken. Also, shade sets tend to produce smaller fields of illumination, forcing you to move further away to produce a wider light that loses even more of its brightness. For always-on lighting, the professional standard is either legacy incandescent bulbs ($$$) or new state-of-the-art LEDs ($$$$). In comparison, this kit has all the aesthetic advantages (compositions with continuous light), has no problems with object/model heating and costs an order of magnitude less.