Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

Terry,

There are a few differences. One, except for softboxes designed for speedlights, nobody makes softboxes as small as these... "hardboxes," let's call them. Even a Chimera extra small is about 4 times the surface area, and extends further forward. with a hardbox, you can place it really tight in on a set without it getting in the way. when you want to carefully place a crisp highlight on a piece of fruit garnishing a cocktail, but not really do much else, this is a very good modifier to have handy.

Another difference is the evenness of the surface. not just in terms of illumination, but overall smoothness. the hardbox is preferable to a softbox when you really want the specular reflection of the light source to be a feature of the shot. sometimes the front baffle on a softbox gets wrinkled, or droopy. or the edges end up being nearly a rectangle, but not quite. and as a matter of fact, a softbox with an inset lip (while allowing for grids, which are useful at other times) would be less likely to give the perfect edge. you would be dependent on that fabric being pulled perfectly straight, which is not always a sure bet, and there is a chance that the light from the sofbox would illuminate those fabric edges. None of this matters if you are shooting matte items, or portraits. It is all for extremely precise still life of glossy subjects. I have a hard time imagining any other reason why someone would want one of these.

Hmmm...

I wonder if you could take a smaller softbox like the Photoflex Litedeome small size:

https://photoflex.com/products/litedome-small

And just sort of jerry rig the front baffle out of either plexi, or make a hard frame for the front where you could stretch the fabric across the frame, and then mount the frame to the front of the soft box?