580 master w/ 420 slave

How well does the combo work?? I will be buying the 580 in a month or so! Will it work out of the view of the camera, how many feet, Does it shoot all the time or does it fail a lot? Can I do the feature and what is it called if I have 2 flashes right by each other and on the 1st shot it fires the first salve and on the second it fire the 2nd slave? Thank You!

It will work fine,I use mine about 10-15 feet with no problem,I usually have a stofen omni bounce on the 420 it works just great

I'm not sure what that's called but, yes, you will be able to fire two different slaves that are side by side independently of each other. The trick is to set them to two different channels and then switch the master from one channel to the other. I'm not sure why you would want to do that, though.

And, BTW, if the 580 and the 420 are within "sight" of each other, the combo is flawless and will always fire as you would expect them to. The only time this isn't true is if they are having difficulty "talking" to each other (spaced too far apart, line-of-sight being obstructed by something or someone, ambient lighting too bright, etc.).

Ok! Thanks for the info, Pocketwizard would solve all the problems huh?

Yes, using three PocketWizards would allow you to do the same thing that you could with just one more extra 580/550EX or an ST-E2 except that with the pocketwizards you lose all ETTL functionalities.