I’m the kind of photographer that is always looking for ways to save money by either building stuff myself or buying cheaper, non-brandname materials when it seems safe to do so. I do as much research before taking that plunge as possible though. Despite my best efforts, I sometimes fail in this regard. A good example is when I tried to save money on radio slaves for my flashes.

When initially researching radio slaves I quickly determined that Pocket Wizard was the best name. Unfortunately they’re also exhorbitantly priced. They do have the reputation of being exceedingly reliable and very easy on battery power, but I thought I’d give a lower priced unit a chance. I bought a generic radio slave off of eBay for a very small amount. It was a four channel version that claimed to be effective up to 100 feet (30 meters) and have a sync speed of up to 1/1000. For use with a small flash you needed to use the 1/8″ jack adapter and insert into a hotshoe socket adapter that had to be purchased seperately.

 

The units seemed to work well initially and I felt vindicated in my coup over high-priced, brandname bullying. Alas, my victory was short lived. I used the remotes at a wedding a few weeks later. They soon let me down. I missed a few potentially great shots because of flash misfire. It wasn’t due to slow flash recycling as I suspected. I even changed the batteries on the flash just in case. I was also noticing that I was seeing the shutter in some of pictures even though I was only at a speed of about 1/80.

After the wedding I did some more experimenting and found that the receiver seemed to eat up AA batteries almost as fast as the flash did, which accounted for sometimes seeing the shutter in the pictures. However, I can not figure out why it only fired sporadically (about 70% of the time it would fire). I can only speculate that the hotshoe is to blame because the receiver always got the signal from the transmitter. Regardless, the units are not reliable in a professional sense. For amateur usage where the odd misfire doesn’t really matter that much, they are still a good value though, at least in my opinion. But when photographing people, where you need split second timing, you just can’t afford to use these units.

As a result I will be biting that bitter bullet and purchasing some Pocket Wizard units. I hate it when I lose!