Another "Poverty Wizard" alternative

For those wanting to experiment with OCF and looking for a set of economical triggers as an alternative to Cactus, Yongnuo, etc. - Calumet has their 4-channel radio triggers on sale for $49 (1 transmitter, 1 receiver) right now.

I've got a set of CyberSyncs on the way, but have been getting impatient and eager to start playing with OCF. I saw these on Calumet's website and figured they were worth a try - at the very least I'd have them as a set of spares, and the price was right. Tested them today and haven't had a misfire yet in over 100 exposures, distances up to about 60 feet and through two walls. The only downside I can see is that they don't allow sync speeds much faster than 1/160. On the instruction sheet that comes with them they advise to keep SS at 1/125 or less, but I've had consistently good luck with 160. Obviously you don't get TTL, high-speed sync, etc. with them - but for the price they don't seem to be a bad option to start off with. Advice: if you're going to use them with a flash which doesn't have a 1/4" mini phone jack, you'll need to buy a hotshoe adapter similar to the FlashZebra #0128. I had bought the #0126 in anticipation of using it with my CyberSyncs, and had to cobble it together with the trigger using a dual 1/8" coupler from Radio Shack. Good enough for now.

No affiliation with Calumet other than being a paying customer - just wanted to toss these out there since I haven't seen them mentioned in any of the trigger threads yet. They're normally $99, which didn't tempt me much - but at $49 they hit my "impulse buy" point and I couldn't resist.

Update - I popped a couple hundred photos last night (playing with water drop photography), and had no misfires whatsoever. I take back what I said about consistent success at 1/160, though....I did get a few black frames and had to dial it back once in a while. I'd estimate about a 50% success rate at 1/160. They missed sync at 1/125 once in a great while (bit of shutter shadow at the bottom of the frame), but anything below that worked perfectly every time.

As long as you can put up with the speed limitations, I'd consider them a viable alternative to the other "Poverty Wizards" - at least you don't have to deal with misfires or unchecked random firing.

Veemac wrote in post #8284919
As long as you can put up with the speed limitations, I'd consider them a viable alternative to the other "Poverty Wizards" - at least you don't have to deal with misfires or unchecked random firing.

Sorry but i had exactly this problem with the calumet 4 channel tripper. The first one i got wouldn't fire by hotshoe... sent it back... then i got one that seemed to work at first, then my mobilight 301 started repeatedly firing, charge-fire-charge-fire... I of course after changing the channel repeatedly on the slave with no improvement, I blamed the problem on the mobilights... Then when i was playing around with the lights at home, i thought "hey why don't i see if i can reproduce the failure with a set of work cybersyncs. There was no failure at all. I am pissed at the calumet triggers. I ordered a set of cybersyncs right away. The system is very reliable now. I let an electrically inclined friend of mine use the calumet slaves with his 285 strobist setup... he had the idea to wrap the receiver in tinfoil. He says that seems to work. Not happy. I sent an e-mail to calumet today to see about a return for credit.