If you shoot a lot of off camera flash like me, you know that Pocket Wizards have long been the standard among professionals for radio frequency triggers. Simply put: the just work. Every. Time.
So when Pocket Wizard announces a whole new system for its radio triggers, naturally it gets people’s attention including my own. The big news with the new triggers is full ETTL (Canon) or iTTL (Nikon) support. Pop your flash on the FlexTT5 receiver, put a MiniTT1 transmitter on your camera shoot wireless TTL flash without the line-of-sight limitations of infrared systems.
If that wasn’t cool enough, the new system claims to be able to buy you a FULL STOP more shutter speed sync out of your flash setup WITHOUT switching your flashes into FP high speed sync mode. The way it pulls this off is incredibly cool, not to mention incredibly complex. Think of it like this: to the human eye, a flash burst is essentially instantaneous. But if you talk about it in very small increments of time (try milliseconds) a flash burst is actually three separate events. The “ramp-up” is where the flash begins to fire and come up to full power, followed by the actual time the flash is at full power, and finally the trail-off. The traditional 1/250 second sync speed on cameras is designed to capture the entire life of a flash burst.
So what if your radio trigger could fire your flash BEFORE your camera’s shutter opened? The new pocket wizards do exactly that. Before the shutter snaps open, your flash(s) have already finished the ramp-up portion of their firing cycle, buying you a stop extra of shutter speed and only a 5% loss in flash power.
When you consider that a stop in camera terms is a doubling or halving of available light, a full stop extra with the new Pocket Wizards effectively makes your flashes TWICE as powerful. Pretty cool stuff if you ask me. Canon shooters get lucky too, the new Pocket Wizard system is being released for the Canon system first. Check out the links below for more good information:
http://strobist.blogspot.com/2009/02/pocketwizard-flextt5-and-minitt1-full.html
http://www.pocketwizard.com/inspirations/technology/
Ben.