Ok I bought these bad boys a couple months ago cause I am a poor photographer and cannot afford the “industry-standard” Poverty Wizards … (I mean Pocket Wizards). I wanted to use them for a while before writing a definitive review on them. So here I go:
SUMMARY:
Get them. Get them NOW!. They work. They’re reliable. They’re cheap.
You can get two Skyports for the price of one Pocket Wizard … HERE
DESIGN:
They’re designed really well but there are both a positives and a negatives. They’re smaller and lighter then the Pocket Wizards (PW). I can fit 3 of them of them in my bag and they take up no more room than a small 50mm F1.8 lens. Try fitting 3 PWs in your bag. Unfortunately they are smaller because they use built in lithium-ion batteries and not AAs. This is bad because you never know how much batter is in them and if you run out of batteries on an assignment you’re SOL. Fortunately the battery life lasts forever and I have never ever run out after flashing 500+ times. I usually just charge them up once every couple assignments but generally I am never worried.
Then Skyports are just so tiny and it doesn’t take up too much space on your camera or your flash. I find it funny whenever I see photographers shooting with PW and they have this gigantic antenna coming out of their cameras which just looks pretty funny. With the Skyports you have the option of extending the antenna or keeping it tucked in. Normally I keep it tucked in as this will hopefully avoid it snagging on something and breaking. I feel the antenna is probably the weakest part of this design but I still think it is durable enough as the antenna sorta bends so it will probably not be ripped out of its socket.
Because they’re so small and almost weightless I think they’re pretty durable. I have dropped them on occasion but they just keep on ticket. They literally are almost weightless. One thing I hate about the Skyport transmitter (the one that goes on top of your camera) design is that it is held on top of your camera’s hotshoe only by friction. It does not have a hotshoe lock of any kind and I have often found myself accidentally knocking it slightly ajar and getting “misfires” because of loss of hotshoe contact or just dropping it randomly.
PERFORMANCE:
They work as you expect. They fire flashes from a great distance away! Has a long range and works really well through walls but I have yet to do any formal distance calculations. I probably would not feel safe leaving a bunch of flashes 300m from me anyways. It would probably get stolen before I could run the 300m and catch up to the thief anyways!
What’s really neat about the Skyports are that it has 2^3 = 8 main channels plus 4 subchannels. This means that the Skyports have effectively 8×4 = 32 possible channels! The $200 EACH Pocket Wizards only support 4 channels so you are getting a steal here. A really sweet future is to set different lights on different subchannels so you can control the firing of different lights. This is VERY useful when wanting to see how the light output from each light effects your scene.
I personally have never used the Pocket Wizards but I have used the eBay “Gadget Infinity” triggers and for $30 for the set it is a great example of .. “You get what you paid for”. They’re unreliable, don’t always fire, and their sync speeds rely on the current battery charge. With the Skyports I can get 1/1000s flash sync speed with my Nikon D1x and boy does that open up some sweet creative shooting possibilities.
I enjoy shooting portraiture and fashion, so I don’t really get a chance to try out the super long range limits of the Skyports. I usually use them within a single room. I have tested them from over a 50 meters and they fire through several large concrete rooms without problem. I am sure range increases drastically with better operating conditions such as a wide open field. Here are some photos of the Skyports in action.
CONCLUSION:
I honestly don’t know what to say but you should go buy them now. There are newer alternatives that have recently come out like the TTL enabled RadioPoppers, but you need to buy a Nikon based IR-transmitter either a $300 SB800 or a $300 SU-800 which sorta makes it pointless? Plus manual is still the way to go. My friend Justin once told me when I was just starting out that TTL is unreliable and that Manual flash photography is the way to go. I never believed him till I personally started doing a lot of Manual stuff myself. Now I am a believer. I leave you with a few photos of the Skyports in action!
