Pocket Wizards? No, thanks!

Sunday Dec 21,2008 10:29 PM
By tone77
In Random

Having had the poverty wizards I bought on recommendation from a guy at Vanbar in Melbourne, I’ve found myself in situations where these were not man enough to trigger my external flash. They were fine through an open door (as below) but would fail to trigger 9/10 times when trying to trigger through a wall or a window.

So after a couple of weeks trying to convince myself to buy a set of Pocket Wizard Plus IIs my birthday came around and I was fortunate enough to receive bank rolling to go and get the PWs but I wanted to make sure I was getting the right thing. I spent another morning doing research on them only to find out the Plus IIs are limited to 4 channels and I wanted more options and didn’t want to pay for a reduced feature set. I’d heard Elinchrom had released some radio transmitters (Skyports) and I spent some time checking their specs, various reviews and some videos - deciding these would be more than sufficient for my needs. For the price I could get a lot more bang for my AUD$ - 8 channels; 4 independent workgroups; over 120m outdoors; a sync speed of 1/1000 s and a rechargeable battery in the receiver.

Decision made! I called Vanbar to reserve the universal set and went up there to purchase my birthday/christmas treat within the hour I also grabbed a flash stand and head to mount my Canon 580 EXII onto and I’m really happy with the set up - umbrella and softbox to follow.

Installation was a breeze, the Skyport receiver has a built in rechargeable battery (the transmitter takes a small flat battery) which I gave a charge and I was away. I’ve not had one misfire in over 50 shots (so far) and I’ve managed to trigger them through 3 walls without fail. The receiver plugs into the pc sync socket on the flash and the transmitter can either sit on the hot shoe of the camera or plug into its pc sync cable socket.

Overall, I’m extremely pleased with them. Thanks Santa Looking forward to using them more in the new year.