I ordered this through Amazon. The SMDV MySlave showed up as a small package. I opened it, and was impressed with it’s build quality and ease of handling.
I hate cords. I’m not in the mood to spend hundreds on a Pocket Wizard rig, and I wasn’t impressed with the junk sold on eBay (the RD604 types). I’ve gone through two sets of those and they all have the issue of not really working when you really need them to work.
The MySlave has a functional sync setting of 1/180th of a second, which I find to be very useful shooting outdoors when I need the ambient light dropped down a few stops. I tested the MySlave at 250 and found it still maintained sync. As you increase shutter speed, the overall exposure changes, but – unlike the RD604 – it still synced fine, there were no blank frames or flash failures.
The receiver is sensitive enough to trigger a monohead under a light table. I’ve had no issues with it in the few weeks I’ve owned it – and I plan on using it a lot. With the other units, I stopped using them after about 100 shots, not good at all!
To push it’s limits, I connected the receiver to a long sync cable and placed the receiver in another room. It still was able to function. So I moved the transmitter to another room, and it fired the strobes through several walls, so the transmitter is fairly powerful.
ONLY thing I think they need to change is they need to add a strap to the receiver, I don’t like thinking about the receiver dangling by the sync cord from the back of a monohead. I’ll probably rig some type of Velcro strap for this before I use it again.
I love the freedom of working minus sync-cords. I really like this radio slave. I just wish I’d have found it sooner. Don’t waste your money buying that junk on eBay. SMDV is found on Amazon.com.
