Radiopopper X – The Big Reveal
I guess Kevin wasn’t joking around when he said the new Radiopopper units were going to make people very happy.
Less than twelve hours ago the RP crew dropped some photographs of the new units and even posted a RP PDF with some nice juicy details including prices. I’m not going to list it all here, you can just go download the PDF and see it for yourself. I will however list the bit’s I am most excited about:
1. The JRX Studio Kit bundle (1 transmitter and 1 receiver) costs $129 and will not only trigger your flash or studio strobe, if you have Alien Bees or White Lightnings, it will interface with them and let you control the brightness FROM YOUR CAMERA! This is very exciting news to my work flow. No more lowering the boom or stand to adjust the strobe power.
2. The fancy pants PX Receiver ($249 – gulp!) sticks right over your flash’s “eye” kind of like the Nice Radio Pop Mod. No more gaffers tape on your flash – unless you’re into that sort of thing you kinky devil.
3. The PX Transmitter (also $249 – gulp again) can trigger the JRX units attached to your non Canon/Nikon flashes and/or studio strobes and, that’s right, if they are Alien Bees or White Lightnings you can adjust their power FROM YOUR CAMERA while you separately adjust the power for your Canon/Nikon flashes FROM YOUR CAMERA.
4. The JRX Transmitter ($69 if you want it by itself) can trigger and adjust the brightness of your Canon/Nikon strobes in manual mode when they are attached to the PX Receivers. WHAT? YES! SERIOUSLY? I already said yes. I even put it in caps so you wouldn’t miss it. That means if you mostly use your 580 ex II’s in manual mode (which is what I do), you no longer need to have a flash in your hotshoe and can instead just put the JRX transmitter in there.
5. Most importantly the whole family of units actually have easy to remove battery covers!!!!!!!!
Okay. There is still some mystery at this time, like how do they stick on the flash. My guess is you still use velcro, however, in the RPX video below, they don’t show any velcro. Probably to keep it looking clean for the vid, but we’ll see. I don’t really mind velcro, but if they’ve got some sort of magic elf magnet or something in there, that could be cool.
I’m reluctant to get too deep into things I don’t like. In fact, I won’t do it. Not in this post anyway. There are a few things I wish they did different about the units (if they didn’t do them), but since I haven’t used them and we don’t know everything yet I’ll wait until after I’ve given them a good work over.
These are clearly a huge leap in technology over what was already on the cutting edge of tech-sorcery. Barring the Radiopopper guys getting arrested for breaking the laws of physics I’ll be upgrading as soon as they open the preorders.
And now… the video
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The kit price is very nice. However I would like to see more kits. E.g. kits with two and three or perhaps even four receivers.
I really like the way you can upgrade the capability of the JrX basic kit by flashing the receiver. Very cool.
I don’t want to diminish their accomplishment, I’d like to point out that what we want is something that can read the Canon/Nikon flash signalling directly from the hot shoe. I’m certain this is easily possible even if the pins are used differently for each make. It is not rocket science.
greetings,
I’m fascinated by the Radiopopper Xs and wonder if I will resist getting them. Can I resist a radio system with manual remote control of both speedlites and AB monolights?
My complete inability to exploit TTL flash will hold me back. Every time I experiment with TTL, I flee to manual mode when the lighting doesn’t do what I want.
Manual mode only control means one JrX transmitter, plus one JrX studio receiver per monolight (pretty minor cost so far), then one PX receiver per strobe (ouch). The nice (I mean Nice) part of their system is that I could get a PX transmitter later to enable TTL and fp sync. For my set of lights, the price tag adds up to a really nice lens.
But when would I use fp sync? OK, sure, I could have used it just yesterday, but the IR stuff would have worked for me and I was too distracted to try it.
I love the remote control aspect, but that won’t bag me images I can’t get already. If I didn’t have a radio system already, I’d definitely get an all JrX kit for the range and opportunity to upgrade later. I conclude that I’m too lame to benefit from the awesome new capabilities of the PX/JrX.