Photo Light Boxes have been around for years and the pile of victims has stacked up quite high:

The word "Photography" derives from two words, Photo = Light, and Graph = Drawing/Rendering. And so the fact is that Photography is not about expensive cameras and lenses, it's about LIGHT. The camera and lens are tools to record/capture the Light as it is reflected off from the object that is lit. If the lighting is wrong then so is the photo.

There are many types of light, but basically they fall into one of two categories, Intermittent or Continuous.

Continuous light is like your reading lamp, turn it on and it stays on until you turn it off.
Intermittent light is a light that flashes. In photography these are called strobes and they are triggered when the camera shutter button is pressed all the way.

Light Boxes and all Table Top Gizmos ask you to trust continuous lighting as the professional lighting to achieve professional photography. That's so strange because there is not a single professional photographer who use them. All pros use Flash.

Light Boxes use Fluorescent lamps that produce very little light, exhibit inherent flickering, and poor color reproduction. When they claim that these do not flicker it is a comparative against the old magnetic ballast fluorescents of yesteryear. Any continuous light powered by household electricity flickers because it is on AC: Alternating Current. Flickering is bad for photographing gemstones and diamonds because the light flickers in the stones while the picture is being taken, so if you ever wondered why your stones looked milky, this is one of the principle culprits. (NOTE: Flash units have a condensor that is charged by AC or DC. When fired the Flash releases energy from the condensor as a tremendous burst of bright white light; flickering is impossible with flash). And if you wondered why your colors are off the mark with light boxes and such it is because they use 6500 Kelvin, (Kelvin is the color scale of light), 6500K is quite blue rather than photographic white. Photographic strobes are true white 5600 Kelvin. The 900 degrees Kelvin difference sets 6500K fluorescents far off professional photographic standards.

Another critical value of photographic lighting is CRI: Color Rendering Index, the highest value being 100. Lights used in light boxes are at best 80 CRI, and at worst is anyone's guess, that's really bad.

And more problems because these companies then mix halogen and LED lighting with fluorescent lamps. The promise made is that these different lights having different Kelvin (colors) solve the problem of correct color of colored gemstones. Nothing could be further from reality. The amount of Halogen light by itself is insufficient to take a picture, the amount of LED light is insufficient to take a picture, and the amount of fluorescent light is also insufficient take a picture. And so you turn all of these lights on at the same time to get a brighter light, but by doing so you combine three radically different light colors (Kelvin) and end up with a white balance so insanely out of whack that no camera can meter it, the result being truly bizzare colors in your photos.

And then there is the Sparkle Light. Okay... nice idea, we all want our gemstones, diamonds, and metallics to sparkle. But... sparkle is what our eyes see when light is in motion, not when it is frozen in a tiny fraction of a second which is exactly what a photograph is. The only way to capture sparkle is with an image in motion such as video. The only thing you will get from their sparkle lights are ugly spots, those unsightly flares on the stones and metallic, a far cry from the sparkle you paid for.

Light Box and table top gizmo companies all promise a clean white background for your images. What do they mean by the word "clean"? One thing for sure, it is nowhere near "Pure White". In fact, how about green and grey, because that is what you get. Fact is, it is impossible to get a pure white background from any of them. Their answer... use photo editing "Brighten and Contrast" to fix it; but they don't tell you that doing so radically erodes image edges, body and detail, the image literally falls apart right before your eyes.

Positioning pieces in light boxes and/or gizmos is no easy task. So they provide (at added cost) jewelry stands, all of which obstruct the piece itself. Having a clip covering the inside back of a ring shank is an ugly nightmare to edit out. Earrings fastened to an obvious stand is just as horrible. Draping a bracelet over an arched gizmo might be fine in a display case, it is not acceptable for a professional image. As for necklaces, just flop it on the floor and pray it lands in an attractive posture. They also recommend wax to hold things in place inside the hot light box, but the heat softens wax such that it can't hold anything, but it does a great job making a mess of your jewelry. Higher priced light boxes have cooling fans but they're still too hot inside to stiffen wax.

And after all of these negatives, a light box is still better than any table top gizmo, tent, or collection of random parts offered by others, yet what they share in common is that jewelers would rather pay less on a hope and a prayer than accept the reality that doing so is the most expensive choice possible. Yep, and they are right, most jewelers refuse to look beyond purchase price for the real price called "Cost of Ownership". And here's an eye opener, some light boxes cost up to $22,000, and while that price would seem a sure sign of "Professional"... it isn't because even at $22,000 they use fluorescent lights having every downside of a budget light box.

It's never about purchase price. It's always about what does and doesn't work as defined by "Cost of Ownership".

Getting technical in simple terms:

We've all seen pictures of rings where the back of the shank looks like mush and the stones are dead. And we've all seen images of bracelets where it is impossible to clearly identify the clasp. What you see here is not a focus issue; it is a "Depth of Field" issue. This is a result of improper Aperture.

Aperture: Think of this as your eye. In bright light your pupils are tiny pinpoints, at night they are large dots. In the bright light you can see far and clear, long depth of field. At night your pupils enlarge to let in as much light as possible so that you can see something, but you see not too far and not very clear, this is shallow depth of field. A camera lens works exactly the same way.

And so to use the tiny pinpoint pupil (Aperture) of a lens you must have intensely bright light, and we have all seen it before, it is that camera flash that blinds you. That is what it takes to use a pinpoint aperture. No continuous light can do that. And now we're getting to why real professional photographers only use flash.

Flash allows us to use the tiniest lens aperture, thus gives us the best possible depth of field for our images. Light Boxes have so little light (you think it's bright looking into one, but it is nothing compared to having a flash pop in your eyes that renders you blind for several minutes, think of it that way.) that you are forced to use a very large aperture just like your pupil behaves in lowlight situations, and the result is exactly the same, shallow depth of field, a picture where more than half of it appears fuzzy, and some of it is just downright unrecognizable.

And so the reality is that any Jewelry Photo Light Box that uses continuous lighting is not going to work. And none of the many Table Top Gizmos such as a photo tent, or a collection of loose components pretending to be a professional photography solution, all of which use continuous lighting, are going to work either.

Photography is about Light. PhotoCubics Inc., developed and makes the only flash powered desktop photo studios in the world. We patented them. We are the one true professional solution. And while flash is the center of our systems, it is only one of several aspects that seamlessly dovetail to make our line of Professional Desktop Photo Studios the only honest solution for anyone to achieve world-class professional pure white background images of jewelry and product in on average 3 minutes.

With PhotoCubics 90% of the image is right straight out of the camera. No more cleaning up dingy backgrounds, no more clipping paths, no more unwanted ugly contrast, no more retouching. Just take the picture and then with a few enhancement steps it is a world-class image. Three minutes.