Canon 600ex-rt v Quadra Ranger

[Ian Barclay]

Hey Guys,

I shoot weddings and I am looking to invest in some significant light power.

I am considering either buying a small army of Canon 600ex-rt (probably 6 units) or the Elinchrom Quara Ranger pack.

For me, the speedlights give me flexibility and instant backups should a unit fail however charging batteries could be a hastle.
I shoot with a 5D3 so I could control the 600ex-rts from the Camera and get highspeed sync when required.

The Quadra is more more powerful but only give me 2 heads on a single pack. I would also have to invest in a pocket wizard setup as I would want the ability to shoot over my sync speed.

Can any one advise or comment and help me decide which way to go?

Cheers, Ian

 

[HoppyUK]

Welcome to TP

That's a big question, and a fair amount of money, so think carefully and try before buying. You need to do some homework and it'll make your head hurt. Without knowing much about your plans, and the right solution will be quite personal to you anyway, just some comments.

Canon 600EX-RT puts out a bit over 100Ws equivalent light. Standard Canon system does not do remote second-curtain sync (3rd party triggers do). Elinchrom Quadra with the faster A-head is about half a stop less bright than the 400Ws S-head. The A-head is also useless for tail-hypersync (to use PW's parlance) as the flash duration is too short. And on the subject of flash durations, most of the quoted t.5 times are very optimistic and don't relate to actual shutter speed equivalents - this is a bit of a minefield, especially when comparing IGBT-type flash vs conventional studio-type heads.

The only way to get pukka high speed sync is with speedlites, currently, and that's available with any TTL trigger but you'll lose a lot of power. PW's peak-hypersync mode (with no power loss) will only get you to around 1/250sec max on a 5D3. Tail-hypersync is another possibility but has significant drawbacks; Lencarta Safari Li-on is good at that.

Also consider Lencarta Atlas (also available under different brands). For your kind of budget, I'd be looking very closely at the Profoto B1