Interfit Cfl Systems - Anyone Use Them?
 

HI is anyone using any of the Interfit CFL continuous lighting kits?

What is the quality of their bulbs in terms of of their CRI rating?

I guess I'm not the only person that is curious about these lights! On paper they have a lot of advantages, i.e., soft light, daylight balanced, cool, lower power consumption and relatively low cost. I am interested in product videography and photography with these.

Here's a link to them at a UK photo store Interfit - Continuous Daylight Balanced Lighting Camera Accessories

Any better deals in the EU?

I just recently brought a 4x 5500K E27 socket 85W CFL bulbs from German eBay and those are really powerful 1200W equivalent for the four combined. I also have a Power-Up adapter from South-Korea that converts regular E27 household socket to four-in-one lamp head so I could have a 1200W equivalent lamp instead of a 100W regular bulb sure it consumes 4x 85W and could be dangerous but it produces the same or lesser amount of heat as a 100W bulb alone.
Also those daylight CFL bulbs are great for practicals just replace the regular ones with those and you get daylight balanced light that is easily mixed with outdoor light without getting that blue light from the windows we are used to see with digital video.
So search te bay with keywords like "5500k" "85W" er even "KonovaStudioWholesale" from Google. But be sure the temps of the bulbs are below 6000K or you get a bit too cold light when compared to daylight white balance preset, 5400 to 5500k is the ideal and 5800 is also good.

By the way I'm sure the kino-flo type of tubular bulbs in soft panel configuration will give you even more light than those E27 type regular CFLs I mentioned.

Cheers,
T

I had a chance to see and handle an Interfit kit recently (two 5-bulb softboxes). The price is very attractive (under $400 for two softboxes with stands). The main problem with them is that even with 5 CFLs in each head, the output is very low. It seemed like the lights would have to be very close to your subject to be effective, particularly if you are working in an environment with a lot of ambient (natural outdoor) light. Having daylight balanced lights only seems practical to me if you are shooting in tandem with actual daylight (as in light coming in a window). With these lights, it seems like you would have to heavily scrim the window light to match the intensity of the CFLs. I have not actually used a setup like this, so your mileage may vary.