Anyone have exp. with Chinese Arri knockoffs?

[Ian Dart]

there is a reason the arri's cost $380.......... they work........... and in 20 years they will still be working
which is a lot more than can be said about the cheap asian copies.

[Mike Peterson]

Originally Posted by Ian Dart

there is a reason the arri's cost $380.......... they work........... and in 20 years they will still be working
which is a lot more than can be said about the cheap asian copies.

That my be but for some of us that is too much for a light right now. If a light can hold up for a year I may have more money later on to buy a more expensive one. In the meantime Arri may have to look at thier pricing model, They are loosing market share and it might not be fair but it is reality, they may have to position themselves to be more competitive.

I had a product that was undercut by the Chinese and I couldn't compete. I grumbled a bit and moved on. It's part of being in a world market. The Chinese start with crap but after a few versions they learn and start upping the quality. The same thing happened when I was young..."Made in Japan" was the war we were fighting back then and eventually the Japanese surpassed the quality of our own. At that point you need to look at your competitiveness and not rely on your brand name.

[Peter Arnold]

Look, actually it's very easy.

The English critic, essayist, & reformer John Ruskin wrote in 1874:

"It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money -- that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot -- it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.

There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey."


Written in 1874 and still true in 2012!


Peter

[Phillip Palacios]

Originally Posted by Mike Peterson

That my be but for some of us that is too much for a light right now. If a light can hold up for a year I may have more money later on to buy a more expensive one. In the meantime Arri may have to look at thier pricing model, They are loosing market share and it might not be fair but it is reality, they may have to position themselves to be more competitive.

I had a product that was undercut by the Chinese and I couldn't compete. I grumbled a bit and moved on. It's part of being in a world market. The Chinese start with crap but after a few versions they learn and start upping the quality. The same thing happened when I was young..."Made in Japan" was the war we were fighting back then and eventually the Japanese surpassed the quality of our own. At that point you need to look at your competitiveness and not rely on your brand name.

Rent as needed until you do have enough for at least a little higher quality than the total knock offs on flea-bay. An Arri softbank kit in my area is $50 a day, well worth renting vs buying if you aren't using them every day. I went with a couple of the Coollights fluorescents for my day to day lights and rent fresnels as needed, which is not very often.
I really don't see Arri losing market share to the flea-bay knockoffs, those who are buying those cheapies would not have been buying the Arris anyway, they'd be retrofitting shop lights from home depot (remember all those DIY guides from 5 years ago?)

[Bob Hart]

Phillip.


Don't be a hard man now. I have fond memories of those "home depot" lights. ( we call them Bunnings lights out here.) and I used them as pretend floodlights and ersatz streetlights by hiding one up in a tree.

I still have the patterns for the flags and slide-on frame I designed for them. They even have blue daylight globes for them out here. You turn them on and they smoke and you can see the colour histogram transition towards warm as you watch while the blue ink burns off.

You could hang two layers of blue gel off the top handle with clothes pegs if you took it off and reversed it forward.

A sandwich of 6 flat and 5 spring washers on longer hingebolts made them an absolute pleasure to line up then expect them to stay put.

Take the wire mesh out and you got rid of the shadows and they did not do too bad with an aluminium iceblock grid from the freezer of an old Kelvinator hung on the front, even if it began to smell like fishfingers and frozen peas after a while.

The best fun of all was putting an 800watt redhead globe in the 100watt groundlevel ones which were a direct fit. Imagine the shrieking silly giggles you hear from his mates when some clown starts a V8 which has been shoehorned into a 4 cylinder Cortina and there's no exhausts on it yet and you get the picture. The globes actually lasted longer than in real redheads. You took the glass out of course and your burn time was about 15 minutes before the metal diecasting began to slump. It was wise to sit them on a baking tray so that you did not set the place alight and people learned pretty quick never to pick them up.

Fond memories of those mothroasters.. May they rest in peace in the shed until the next barbecue.

[Phillip Palacios]

This was great! Thanks for the vivid memories. May those lights stay dusty and unused!

Coollights are the best cost/value I have found there may be others, but i stopped looking when I bought the flos from them.