430EXII recycle time

Wilt wrote in post #12233399
tch! tch! tch! ...you didn't heed Canon's warning on p. 7 of the 430EXII owner manual about exceeding 20 continuous flashes!

Manual, what manual, I don't need no stinkin' manual! Beside, it wasn't continuous, I had to change the flash settings

Wilt wrote in post #12233399
Interesting...output at HIGHER intensity (0EV FEC) had more shots than the output at lower intensity (-2EV FEC) before running out of steam ?!

I should have stated that the number of shots I took were random. On the ETTL flashes I just squeezed off what I thought were enough to get an Idea of recycle time. I'm not sure how many I would have had to fire before a mis-fire. The one mis-fire in manual 1/2 power could have been because I squeezed off a shot quicker than the others.

windpig wrote in post #12233326
I just shot the following from the hot shoe with the 430EXII, single shot mode,

ISO 100
SS 125
F.8
CAMERA 7D

ETTL -2 FEC - 7 shots non stop no mis-fire
ETTL 0 FEC - 10 shots non stop no mis-fire
Manual 1/2 power 11 shots 5th shot mis-fire

28 shots within 58 seconds.

This sounds like my experience with my Canon flashes. They recycle very quickly and will hit numbers like this without a miss fire with full batteries.

I always worry about frying the system when I do lots of rapid fire but Inhave rarely used full power with a 580ExII. I just haven't found a place where I feel really good about using speedlights but wish I could because of the portability. Last week I shot a singer songwriter in a coffee shop who was kind of up against the front window on a rainy day. She asked me to just document it and I was forced to put a speedlight on the camera with a Stophen diffuser and cranked it down to about a stop and a half below as a fill and it wasn't horrible.

Jannie wrote in post #12245335
I always worry about frying the system when I do lots of rapid fire but Inhave rarely used full power with a 580ExII..

Canon designed in the foolish-protection (a.k.a. thermal protection) circuit into the 580EXII, since too many prior fools burned out their 580EX by not reading and heeding the warning in the user manual, and got PO'd at Canon for their own neglect.