I bought some photography backdrops a couple of years ago so that when I made my assembly box cards videos for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas for YouTube to give me a little more festive background instead of just my plain old wall in my plain old bedroom that needs to be repainted stat. Some of them did not turn out to be very good quality, and I’ll tell you why.

So, three of the backdrops that I bought say Econ Vinyl as their material. One of them just says cloth backdrop. The cloth backdrop is still good, there’s no problem with the cloth one. When I say problem, I mean when you fold the backdrop when you’re finished using it and then you open it again many times, it tends to get faded along the folds. Here’s an example of one of the backdrops that I bought that is not holiday related, but something that was related to the theme of a blanket that I was crocheting for a video, which I still have yet to make lol. I used the backdrop many times anyway and folded it and opened it and folded it etc. So this is what it looks like now.

Now, you can see all of those lines where the folds are where the fabric looks like it faded out. I honestly don’t know what happened to them. It happened to all of the Econ Vinyl backdrops that I bought from Amazon.

I have an old light box that I bought many years ago for taking pictures of my Etsy products so that I would have a nice picture for the listings, but it turned out to be too small so I could never really use it that easily. I just bought a bigger one that’s probably twice as big and it is a lot better, but the backgrounds that they gave me were just plain white, black, light blue and gray. Well, I don’t mind the white or the black one, but I’m not going to use the blue one or the gray one. So I figured I want to get something that has this graphic of the space theme that is similar to this backdrop that I had. So I went to JoAnn’s website and found the exact same fabric. This fabric is a little more zoomed out than the backdrop. I mean you could probably say that the backdrop is this pattern a little more zoomed in if you will.

Both of these pictures are taken at the same angle, so you can see what I mean about it being zoomed out. Or the original backdrop being zoomed in. The pattern is exactly the same, except much smaller. Which actually works better for me because I will be taking close up pictures, and I would like as much of that graphic to show on the Etsy listings anyway. So this is perfect.

So what I’m saying is if you are looking for a backdrop on Amazon for photography reasons or you’re just making YouTube videos or whatever it is that you need a backdrop for, make sure it says fabric and not Econ Vinyl, unless you plan on keeping it open all the time.

I don’t know if this works for other people or not but, I just feel like it was a huge waste of money for me because I can never use these backdrops again.