bieber
28th of June 2007 (Thu), 23:36
I ordered myself a Nikon SB-25, used from B&H (it's a something like ten years old flash unit) to use off-camera, and it came in the mail today. I don't have my Pocket Wizards yet, so I would have just stuck it off to the side until I got them, but the folks at B&H were nice enough to leave a set of batteries in it, so I went ahead and stuck it on my 20D and play around a little.
It appears to have all the little extra features that my 580EX does, with the exception of high speed sync. It's got rear-curtain, stroboscopic, built-in bounce card and wide-angle diffuser, zoom head, illuminating LCD screen, all that nice stuff. The buttons and switches are a little difficult to work (switches are small, and buttons are recessed a little too deep), but the interface works very smoothly otherwise.
It can't do any sort of TTL with digital cameras, and certainly not with a Canon digital, of course, but it has an auto-thyristor mode, which I decided to try out. You have to manually set your ISO and aperture on it, but once that's done, I've found that it meters amazingly accurately. My testing was pretty limited---direct and bounced flash in a small room---but I found that pretty much everything was more or less perfectly exposed, with just one shot slightly underexposed. The nice thing about it is, it appears that it just measures the overall amount of light coming back at it, so it doesn't get fooled by the colors in a scene the way TTL metering does.
All-in-all, it seems to be a VERY capable flash unit (I'm starting to see what the Nikon people mean when they say Nikon has a better flash system: this thing is over a decade old, and it has a built-in PC socket and auto-thyristor mode, things Canon just now added with the 580EXII), and I can't wait to get it on a stand with a pocket wizard. If you're looking for a cheap flash to use remotely, or just a general-use flash on a tight budget, I can't reccomend one of these too highly (this one cost me $89 from B&H, and it has one noticeable blemish on it, a smudge on the labeling by a switch).
Oh, and on a side note, the flash head appears to be almost exactly the same size as the one on my 580EX, so snoots, grid spots, and so on that I put together should fit either one interchangeably.
It appears to have all the little extra features that my 580EX does, with the exception of high speed sync. It's got rear-curtain, stroboscopic, built-in bounce card and wide-angle diffuser, zoom head, illuminating LCD screen, all that nice stuff. The buttons and switches are a little difficult to work (switches are small, and buttons are recessed a little too deep), but the interface works very smoothly otherwise.
It can't do any sort of TTL with digital cameras, and certainly not with a Canon digital, of course, but it has an auto-thyristor mode, which I decided to try out. You have to manually set your ISO and aperture on it, but once that's done, I've found that it meters amazingly accurately. My testing was pretty limited---direct and bounced flash in a small room---but I found that pretty much everything was more or less perfectly exposed, with just one shot slightly underexposed. The nice thing about it is, it appears that it just measures the overall amount of light coming back at it, so it doesn't get fooled by the colors in a scene the way TTL metering does.
All-in-all, it seems to be a VERY capable flash unit (I'm starting to see what the Nikon people mean when they say Nikon has a better flash system: this thing is over a decade old, and it has a built-in PC socket and auto-thyristor mode, things Canon just now added with the 580EXII), and I can't wait to get it on a stand with a pocket wizard. If you're looking for a cheap flash to use remotely, or just a general-use flash on a tight budget, I can't reccomend one of these too highly (this one cost me $89 from B&H, and it has one noticeable blemish on it, a smudge on the labeling by a switch).
Oh, and on a side note, the flash head appears to be almost exactly the same size as the one on my 580EX, so snoots, grid spots, and so on that I put together should fit either one interchangeably.