Pro Photo Show

by Gavin Seim: Triggering flashes wirelessly is becoming a popular creative lighting tool. Popular flashes from Canon and Nikon often have built in wireless, but its basically working with old infrared technology making it essentially a line of sight tool with limited reliability.

To resolve this, various third part products have come to the market. Pocket Wizards have been a popular choice and their early units, though larger and only providing manual control, seem to have a good reputation. More recently we’ve seen products that offer not only manual, but full auto control.

So, on to my straight dope review. First I purchased PW’s new Flex Control TL series which have full TTL functionality and high speed sync (Canon only for now, but Nikon coming soon). Sadly I was disappointed with almost useless results (for me at least). Range was claimed to be hundreds of feet and actual tests would not even produce consistent results at fifty.

Often they didn’t fire at all and other times gave full dumps instead of the set power. Some of these issues are said to be fixable in firmware (easily updatable by the way), but the core problem seems to be that PW shipped a product who’s operation is interfered with by the very flashes it’s said to work with. The folks at PW tech gave strings of reasons why their system was totally unreliable, and their solutions were things like, use the lower end 430EX flash instead of the 580, or use an off hot-shoe cord attaching the PW to the flash to help reduce interference.

You’d think it was Canon who was claiming their flashes were made to work with Pocket Wizards products. In reality PW shipped a product advertised to work with the Canon system and seemed to know full well it had major issues. Sorry, but for five hundred a pair, I expect these to work as advertised.

Next I tried Radio Poppers new PX series. Rather than attaching to the hot-shoe, these sit on the flash, pick up the IR signals, convert them to radio waves and send them back into the receiving end unit. Not quite as elegant, but the bottom line is they worked. You get all the functionality that the built in wireless in the flash offers, but with long range and reliability. I’ve been outdoors at around six hundred feet away with them working great and triggering my remote flash with full TTL. They also offer models for both Canon and Nikon flashes.

So the bottom line. I sent back my PW flex series. At this point they seem to be an epic fail. I liked the physical design, features and the whole idea. The only problem is they didn’t work.

Final thoughts. For me Radio Poppers won hands down. I purchased them after the test and I’m really liking them. Yes there’s room for improvement and their mounting, being not a direct hot-shoe attachment, but attaching to the flash itself is a bit more Jerry rigged and requires a flash (or OEM transmitter) on camera, but the most important thing is that they work reliably.

I suggest you make your own informed decision based on the latest reviews and info. There’s a great bunch of great review videos from the folks over at Tri Coast. I’ll embed their summery below, but you can find all eight test videos via the link. They had slightly better results than with the PW’s than I did, but their similar findings seemed to confirm that I did not have a faulty set. The bottom line was still that Radio Poppers worked better. Whatever you decide, get out there and get your flash off camera. The results can be magical. Have fun, Gav