by Gavin Seim Updated 04/2010: 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 using RF (radio signal). 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. We’ll look at a few today.

UPDATE: 04/2010: Nearly a year has passed since this review first posted. I’ve been using Radio Poppers since then and they have worked amazingly well (note that I have no vested interest in either company). Pocket Wizards have released further firmware updates to their Flex series as well as other workarounds. While I have not purchased another set (and have no intention of doing so), I have seen little evidence that the Flex has been fixed other than tacky workarounds, like wrapping the flash in an RF shield to prevent interference, or holding the unit off camera tethered to a cord to make it work properly.

When a manufacturer has to resort to these sort of things, I consider the product a fail. If you look at even more recent comments you’ll see people are still having the same poor results. I found that Amazon reviews were mixed. There were various users getting the poor results that I experienced and it seems the positive reviews were mostly users satisfied with a short usable range, rather than what PW advertises. You can read them for yourself via the link.

Bottom Line: If you’re just going to use the Flex units very close in a studio, they “might” satisfy you. But if you plan on using them in the way their advertised and getting long range versatile wireless flash, don’t expect much. They did not perform. Nikon units of the Flex are supposed to be coming soon as of this writing, but I can’t say how well those will function. I have little confidence.

In contrast, Radio Popper PX units are great. RP’s work a bit differently. A base transmitter sits on top of your main flash (no they can’t work solo shoe mounted like the PW’s). A receiver unit is mounted to the front of your remote flash (the new bracket that came out last summer makes this much easier). The remote unit picks up the RF signal from the main unit, converts it back to an IR signal which it shot into the flash onto which it’s attached. All the built in wireless flash functions work like normal (even High Speed Sync) and can be controlled form the flash, because all that’s happening RP’s are forwarding the IR signals into a reliable RF signal and then back again on the other end.

While it may sound a bit more janky and clunky the main thing is they do what their advertised to and do it well. That’s what really matters to me. I have used Radio Poppers latest PX units outdoors at over 500ft apart with full functionality. That’s the kind of reliability I need. Radio Poppers also has both Canon and Nikon units available.

I consider the Flex series to be an Epic fail. While I know many Pocket Wizard products are known to be good (mainly their manual units) I have to say that I have little confidence in them as a company after releasing a product this poor. You can take a look thru the review below that I posted last year for some additional thoughts and information… Gavin

_____