Radio Popper vs PW mini

Blurmore

I need to invest in a modern triggering system. I've been using quantum radio slaves, and the wireless E-TTL for a while and my skill and demands have caught up with their limitations. I was hesitant to go away from the Quantums because of interchangeability between my equipment and they guys I shoot for in DC. I shot a big event in DC Thursday night, and I discovered they have switched to PW's. So without the need for compatibility, the time is ripe for upgrade. Here are my pluses for the Radiopopper. It isn't "inline" so no worries about AF focus assist not operating correctly (an issue I observed Thursday night with another shooter's PW's). I can control my Alien Bees power (that have been sitting at home, but I just bought a mini lithium vagabond) from the PX sender.

Here are my pluses for the PW system. Company has more experience making triggers, seems to be "industry standard". Compatibility with other PW users. Ability to control power of AB's with special adapters.

I'm using these for weddings, but opinions from people who have experience with them in other applications are appreciated.

Village Idiot

Poppers also don't lock to the shoe, IIRC. the PW's have a ring to secure them. They're smaller though. Batteries? Poppers use smaller batteries and the PW's use AA's mostly. PW's have safety in redundancy. Except for the mini, they're all transceivers. If one goes down and it happens to be the one on the camera, then you're not screwed. Removes one from another light and go on. If a Popper transmitter goes down, you better hope you have additional transmitters handy or optical slaves.

Dan7312

What is the inline AF assist problem with PW mini/flex?

Blurmore wrote: »

I need to invest in a modern triggering system. I've been using quantum radio slaves, and the wireless E-TTL for a while and my skill and demands have caught up with their limitations. I was hesitant to go away from the Quantums because of interchangeability between my equipment and they guys I shoot for in DC. I shot a big event in DC Thursday night, and I discovered they have switched to PW's. So without the need for compatibility, the time is ripe for upgrade. Here are my pluses for the Radiopopper. It isn't "inline" so no worries about AF focus assist not operating correctly (an issue I observed Thursday night with another shooter's PW's). I can control my Alien Bees power (that have been sitting at home, but I just bought a mini lithium vagabond) from the PX sender.

Here are my pluses for the PW system. Company has more experience making triggers, seems to be "industry standard". Compatibility with other PW users. Ability to control power of AB's with special adapters.

I'm using these for weddings, but opinions from people who have experience with them in other applications are appreciated.

Dan7312

Radiopoppers make an optical link to the flash, i.e. the transmitter senses the flash or ST-E2 firing on the camera and then sends a radio signal to the receiver on the remote flash, which converts the single into a light pulse that the remote flash sees. So they are limited to the capabilites that the Canon optical link has.

The mini/flex in effect directly extends the hot shoe on the camera to the remote flash. This means you can use second curtain sync on the remote flash. They also tighten up the syncronization a bit and squeeze a stop or two more light out of the flash when you are using HSS. They also have a hyper-sync feature that lets you calibrate the mini/flex to your camera/flashes and shoot at shutter speeds higher than the sync speed for the camera. This gives you more light out of the flash than you would get using HSS.

BTW, if you do go the mini/flex route you really want to get the AC3 zone controller. It lets you make all you flash adjustments from the camera.

You need to attach the mini/flex to a computer to configure it, though you can store 2 different configs in the mini/flex. However once you get things setup you probably won't have to change the configuration. Radiopoppers have a display on them so you can do configuration without a computer.

I have the mini/flex (I use them as an amature, not pro) and found that with the extra config and buttons it took a while to consistently set things up correctly. Adding the AC3 made things easier.

Blurmore wrote: »

I need to invest in a modern triggering system. I've been using quantum radio slaves, and the wireless E-TTL for a while and my skill and demands have caught up with their limitations. I was hesitant to go away from the Quantums because of interchangeability between my equipment and they guys I shoot for in DC. I shot a big event in DC Thursday night, and I discovered they have switched to PW's. So without the need for compatibility, the time is ripe for upgrade. Here are my pluses for the Radiopopper. It isn't "inline" so no worries about AF focus assist not operating correctly (an issue I observed Thursday night with another shooter's PW's). I can control my Alien Bees power (that have been sitting at home, but I just bought a mini lithium vagabond) from the PX sender.

Here are my pluses for the PW system. Company has more experience making triggers, seems to be "industry standard". Compatibility with other PW users. Ability to control power of AB's with special adapters.

I'm using these for weddings, but opinions from people who have experience with them in other applications are appreciated.

Blurmore

Well I bought the RPs, if they are good enough for Dave Black...they are good enough for me. The issue I observed on Thu. was that the PW (flex TT5) in this case was firing the slaves, and the on camera (on top of the flex TT5) flash was firing....but the AF illuminator was not functioning. If I used Nikon I would have gone PW...but I own the noisy Canon flashes (430ex 580exII) and I'm not interested in the 2 pages of instructional FAQ PW provides to adjust flash/transceiver position to get reliable long range triggering.

kdog

Blurmore wrote: »

Well I bought the RPs, if they are good enough for Dave Black...they are good enough for me. The issue I observed on Thu. was that the PW (flex TT5) in this case was firing the slaves, and the on camera (on top of the flex TT5) flash was firing....but the AF illuminator was not functioning. If I used Nikon I would have gone PW...but I own the noisy Canon flashes (430ex 580exII) and I'm not interested in the 2 pages of instructional FAQ PW provides to adjust flash/transceiver position to get reliable long range triggering.

Congrats on the RPs. One of the things that look appealing with PWs is the remote triggering module for a Seikonic light meter. Any way to do something like that with the RPs?

EDIT: To answer my own question, I stumbled across a youtube video showing a very simple solution.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/4AAh93VDvks&quot; frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>