Puluz PU5030 Lightbox Review: Budget Assistant for Home Photographer

I have been think­ing about buy­ing a light­box for a long time. Giv­en that I write a lot of reviews. And for every small thing every time it is real­ly incon­ve­nient to fence a mini-stu­dio. There­fore, at the next sale, I found an inex­pen­sive option, which I received, test­ed a lit­tle and now I want to show you. This light­box is suit­able for shoot­ing small objects, up to about 20 cm in size. And it is also con­ve­nient because when not need­ed, it can be fold­ed into a bag and then it will take up space approx­i­mate­ly like a cou­ple of mag­a­zines.

Puluz light­box fea­tures:

• Mod­el: PU5030
• Num­ber of LEDs: 64pcs
• LED type: 2835
• Lamp bright­ness: 24–26lm
• White light col­or tem­per­a­ture: 6500K
• Warm white col­or tem­per­a­ture: 3200K
• Pow­er: 7–14W
• Volt­age: 5V
• Dim­ming Range: 1%-100%
• Pow­er sup­ply: USB
• Cable length: 2m
• Prod­uct size:
• PU5030: 31*31*1.5cm (fold­ed), 32.7*31*31m (unfold­ed)

The light­box comes in a small bag in which it can be con­ve­nient­ly stored when fold­ed:

Togeth­er with the light­box itself, 6 mul­ti-col­ored back­grounds come in the kit. They are made from thin fab­ric.

The light­box itself is made of thin plas­tic like PVC. It is white and works well as a reflec­tor. If nec­es­sary, it also works well in the light, if you put flash­es on both sides, you can puff them right through the light­box body. In order to assem­ble the light­box, you need to fold 4 sides and fix them on spe­cial cutouts:

From the top inside there is a round lamp with LEDs to illu­mi­nate objects.

The lamp has sev­er­al bright­ness modes and three shades of tem­per­a­ture. All this is con­trolled through the built-in remote con­trol:

When oper­at­ing at full pow­er, the back­light con­sumes up to 1.9A at 5V, but in sleep mode, the con­sump­tion is very small:

If you keep the lamp con­nect­ed to USB, then when you turn it on and off, it remem­bers the last mode in which it was turned off. And if you turn it off, it always turns on in the “cold white” mode with min­i­mum bright­ness. By the way, this is con­ve­nient.

The length of the cord is 2 meters, the con­trol pan­el is locat­ed in the mid­dle of the cord. There is a USB plug at the end of the cord, and in my case it is a lit­tle rusty, of course I did not like it:

But what I didn’t like even more was that the lay­i­box came already bro­ken from the store. One of the cor­ners has such a decent crack. What can you put your fin­gers through:

And it had to be removed with tape. (I wrote to the sell­er, let’s see what he will answer, but most like­ly I will open a dis­pute). Giv­en that the light­box was very well pack­aged, I doubt it was dam­aged dur­ing ship­ping. It looks like it has already been shipped. Bro­ken.

Anoth­er inter­est­ing thing is the hole at the top. Through it, you can stick the lens and shoot objects from the desired angle:

Some­times this script can real­ly come in handy. And the illu­mi­nat­ed ring will act as a ring light. But in this sce­nario, I have not yet exper­i­ment­ed, so I can not say if I per­son­al­ly need it.

Now let’s talk about pho­to­phones. There are six of them: Black, white, blue, red, yel­low, green. They are attached inside the light­box with the help of two lugs and cutouts in the fab­ric itself:

Well, the assem­bled ready-to-shoot box looks some­thing like this:

Now let’s move on to the demon­stra­tion. I must say right away that these are my first test pho­tos. I have not quite fig­ured out the nec­es­sary set­tings yet, so the pho­tos of the exam­ples do not claim to be artis­tic. In addi­tion, I was tem­porar­i­ly left with­out flash­es, due to the fail­ure of the syn­chro­niz­er. With flash­es it would be more inter­est­ing if illu­mi­nat­ed from the side. But so far it has­n’t worked.

For exam­ple, I chose a lens as an object. It fits well as the glass is reflec­tive and the case is black in con­trast. As for the expo­sure, it is dif­fer­ent in dif­fer­ent pho­tographs, due to the fact that with dif­fer­ent pho­to back­grounds you had to find your own lev­el of illu­mi­na­tion and set­tings. There­fore, all exam­ples are dif­fer­ent. So. One object and dif­fer­ent pho­to­phones:

Over­all, not bad, but there is work to be done.

If you pho­to­graph dif­fer­ent objects, then you can select the opti­mal back­ground col­or and, again, you can (need) tin­ker with the cam­era set­tings.

By the way, such a light­box can be used not only for shoot­ing with a cam­era, but also for a reg­u­lar phone. Here are exam­ples of smart­phone shots. The bright­ness is set to max­i­mum, the col­or is white, the tem­per­a­ture is about 4500k:

In gen­er­al, quite good.

Con­clu­sion:

Light­box Puluz PU5030 is an inex­pen­sive solu­tion to improve the qual­i­ty of your pho­tos. With a lit­tle effort, you can get quite good pic­tures that you are not ashamed to use in your reviews. Or you can take a pic­ture of an item for Insta­gram or, for exam­ple, small items for an online store. The advan­tage of such a light­box is a good back­light, good reflec­tive mate­r­i­al and the abil­i­ty to fold it when not need­ed. When fold­ed, it does not take up much space, and when unfold­ed, an ordi­nary chair or stool is enough to cre­ate a mini pho­to stu­dio. The low price is also a plus. But in the minus­es, I would attribute not the most reli­able design (lightbox­ing seemed a bit flim­sy to me) and specif­i­cal­ly in my case bro­ken plas­tic. This means that it is not very reli­able and it is like­ly that over time it will begin to break or crum­ble. And the more you fold it, the faster it will break. There­fore, by the way, I decid­ed that I would find a place for this light­box and always keep it unfold­ed. And to be hon­est, I didn’t real­ly like pho­to­phones. It is with its cel­lu­lar struc­ture, so I will most like­ly look for oth­er, homo­ge­neous pho­to­back­grounds. But that’s lat­er.

Buy light­box Puluz PU5030

Sum­ming up, I can prob­a­bly still rec­om­mend this prod­uct for pur­chase. Still, the price decides. And this is one of the most afford­able options for a begin­ner and not only a pho­tog­ra­ph­er. Such a light­box elim­i­nates the need to look for a suit­able back­ground for film­ing or set­ting up a stu­dio for the sub­ject. And in gen­er­al, for an unde­mand­ing pho­tog­ra­ph­er, this solu­tion will be more than enough. If you shoot pro­fes­sion­al­ly, then you need a more reli­able and high-qual­i­ty prod­uct, but then the price will be much high­er. Every­one decides what he needs. And this is where I end my short review. Good mood to you all.