Lost my flash receivers - thoughts on LED panels?

[Tulipone]

Had a tidy yesterday and realised I have lost my flash receivers somewhere. Tore the place apart looking for them but pretty certain they are gone elsewhere. Was more than a little narked with myself for being careless.

I have been using two off camera Godox TT685 flashes, with an X1 transmitter and two receivers (one for each flash), with one softbox. I understand that this is not a professional set up but then I don’t earn money through it and the results have been acceptable for the outlay cost. Now that the receivers are no longer an option, time to look for something else. Actually the x1 does trigger the flashes as slaves but I got lazy with TTL and this is an opportunity for better especially as I understand x1 receivers for Oly/Panasonic are no longer produced.

Went to WEX in Cambridge and explained my predicament and the guy there suggested a single LED panel as a replacement. Specifically: https://www.wexphotovideo.com/kenro-smart-lite-45w-bi-colour-studio-led-light-panel-3104773/ I accept that my portrait photography skills are very lacking but understood that two complimentary lights are preferred rather than one. The panel also is not ttl and I'm unsure if there is any benefit other than perhaps using the trigger and one slave flash and the panel - but still doesn’t really sit right with me.

Thank you for sticking with me so far. From some reading it appears that an X2 may better control the flashes and also give ttl without receivers. Any one know? I want to keep things easily portable and swift to set up - my usual targets are grandchildren and less fuss is better - what other solutions should I be looking at please? Not sure if it makes a difference but needs to work with Panasonic S5.

Grateful for your thoughts.

 

[Phil V]

I'm confused.

What am I missing? The X1 transmitter will trigger the TT685's. What have you lost? What are the 2 flashes you can't fire?

 

[Tulipone]

The X1 can fire the Godox flashes but only in slave mode I think). It seemed a good time to replace with something better - but wondering if your confusion is a clue that even as slave with set power is okay.

I figured the panel is not progress.

 

[Scooter]

Hi Chris,

I must admit I'm a little confused: the Godox TT685 has the receiver built in. You don't need any kind of external receiver: the X1 will talk to them directly - inc TTL. There are camera-specific X1R receivers - but this is only so they can talk vendor-specific TTL protocols (even when setting power on "manual") to the camera-specific flash guns. Eg the X1R-N can control Nikon flashguns and has a Nikon-type hot shoe on it. Godox flashes don't need the receivers at all. In fact - your X1T-O transmitter will quite happily control TT685s (and any other Godox flash unit) for Canon, Nikon, Sony etc the protocol between the Godox transmitters and flashes is a Godox protocol. In wireless mode, Godox Flashes are universal.

Went to WEX in Cambridge and explained my predicament and the guy there suggested a single LED panel as a replacement

Chris - I think your insight serves you well - this is about as useful as when Tesco replace a dozen eggs, with a tube of toothpaste in your shopping delivery. It is a continuous light - your camera can meter it like any other continuous light - through the lens (TTL) via any of the auto-exposure modes. Continuous lights don't need to "do" TTL - or talk the camera in any way (despite marketing nonsense from at least two LED manufacturers) any more than a table lamp does. These panels are only advantageous for video quite honestly - and even then they are neither here nor there in terms of light quality: way too small to give soft light on a human-sized subject, and way too big to give crisp hard light unless it's so far away, the weak light it puts out (compared to any flash) is not going to show up. If you want LED lights, you're much better off with a more powerful unit with a single composite LED "chip" (often called a COB light - "Chip On Board") that takes standard light modifiers. Something like a Godox SL200. It'll still be very weak next to your TT685s though. This is really bad advice from Wex tbh.

But! Unless I've misunderstood what you have, you don't need any of it - your TT685s should be fully controllable from your X1:-

GODOX X1T-O Wireless Flash Trigger for Olympus and Panasonic Cameras

GODOX X1T-O Wireless Flash Trigger for Olympus and Panasonic Cameras Fully supports TTL functions, autoflash, and HSS 1/8000s High-speed sync,flash exposure compensation,flash exposure lock. Wireless remote control and grouping system. C.Fn 32 Channels 2.4GHz 100m Max range Big and clear LCD...

www.godox.co.uk

TT685o-Product-GODOX Photo Equipment Co.,Ltd.

Founded in 1993 as a high-tech manufacturing facility specializing in lighting and audio equipment, Godox has now become a lighting equipment expert and innovator of gears for photographers, videographers, filmmakers and more. Driven by the mission of offering great lighting and audio solutions...

www.godox.com

Here's a nice little video I found:-

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRCeZrqczhg

 

[Tulipone]

Thank you both for your guidance. I suspect I was too irritated to read the manual properly and was trying to turn the negative to positive without fully understanding what I was doing. Will give what I have better attention later today.

Thank you especially for the YouTube video. Very informative.

 

[Phil V]

If you’re desperate to spend, the Xpro triggers are easier to use (but don’t have the pass through).

But the X1 will trigger your TT685’s in every mode including TTL.

I would add though for simplicity (honest) that if you’re using flash in a studio type setting, TTL is less reliable than setting them manually (either on the transmitter or the flash).

I’m a huge fan of TTL flash when on the move, but in a fixed scenario Manual flash settings simpler and makes processing quicker and easier.

 

[Phil V]

Chris - I think your insight serves you well - this is about as useful as when Tesco replace a dozen eggs, with a tube of toothpaste in your shopping delivery.

The best part of your post - made me laugh out loud

 

[Tulipone]

Thank you both for your replies. A few minutes knowing what is achievable worked and both flashes are responding properly.

The irony is not lost on me that the desire for a more simple off camera flash life after the loss of the receivers is that the receivers were never actually needed and just had the potential to cause further issues.

 

[Phil V]

Every day is a school day

 

[Garry Edwards]

Went to WEX in Cambridge and explained my predicament and the guy there suggested a single LED panel as a replacement.

Customer: My car reversing camera has stopped working, what's the best solution?
Salesman: Buy this bike sir, it doesn't have a reverse gear so you won't need a reversing camera.

And retail shops complain that they're struggling to survive

 

[Tulipone]

The odder thing was that particular panel was out of stock with no date forecasted when it'd be back.

 

[wiltw]

(despite marketing nonsense from at least two LED manufacturers) any more than a table lamp does. These panels are only advantageous for video quite honestly - and even then they are neither here nor there in terms of light quality: way too small to give soft light on a human-sized subject, and way too big to give crisp hard light unless it's so far away, the weak light it puts out (compared to any flash) is not going to show up.Zrqczhg

LED lighting market is so shoddy! They mention light in terms of Lux...try to convert Lux to Lumens or to an expsure of ISO 100 at certain shutter speed and f/stop.

How does Lux convert to an exposure value at ISO 100 ??? Nobody seems to ever compare these lights measured via a conventional incident light meter reading (for example, what aperture at shutter 1/100 at ISO 100!). How do you compare the LED brightness to any other kind of source, like incandescent bulb or even living room in daylight, or a GN130 flash (1/100 f/13 at 10' as ISO 100) ?!

This article sheds some light on the discussion, but the LED lighting industry forces the consumer to learn, they do little to inform...

Light (and lighting) by the numbers

Light (and lighting) by the numbers

www.redsharknews.com

"So, if we measure – say – 1000 lux and we're shooting at ISO 100, the exposure value is the binary logarithm of 1000×100÷330, or about 303, for an EV of 8.2. Various online calculators (and in fact light meters too) will give answers nearby depending on the value of C they prefer.​

You buy on blind faith (or a lot of persistence and calculation) -- and still, how do you factor the different distances from the spec'd measurement distance of 0.5m, some at 0.8m and many at 1.0mm, one at 5m ?!?!,
and the assumed ability to return product to the retailer after you discover 'not bright enough'...quite stupid way to do business! As the consumer, what can I expect in the way of brightness from any of these products?!

The guys writing articles about these products are ill informed and not even aware of what useful information is missing from their articles! Even articles appearing in so-called photography magazines are similarly UNinformative. I place the blame on the fact that so few folks bother to buy or rent lightmeters to make objective measurements which can be published in tables comparing these products! Either that, or the writers are such rookies themselves that they have no idea what the photographic consumer is wondering about.

 

[Garry Edwards]

LED lighting market is so shoddy! They mention light in terms of Lux...try to convert Lux to Lumens or to an expsure of ISO 100 at certain shutter speed and f/stop.

How does Lux convert to an exposure value at ISO 100 ??? Nobody seems to ever compare these lights measured via a conventional incident light meter reading (for example, what aperture at shutter 1/100 at ISO 100!). How do you compare the LED brightness to any other kind of source, like incandescent bulb or even living room in daylight, or a GN130 flash (1/100 f/13 at 10' as ISO 100) ?!

This article sheds some light on the discussion, but the LED lighting industry forces the consumer to learn, they do little to inform...

Light (and lighting) by the numbers

Light (and lighting) by the numbers

www.redsharknews.com

"So, if we measure – say – 1000 lux and we're shooting at ISO 100, the exposure value is the binary logarithm of 1000×100÷330, or about 303, for an EV of 8.2. Various online calculators (and in fact light meters too) will give answers nearby depending on the value of C they prefer.​

You buy on blind faith (or a lot of persistence and calculation) -- and still, how do you factor the different distances from the spec'd measurement distance of 0.5m, some at 0.8m and many at 1.0mm, one at 5m ?!?!,
and the assumed ability to return product to the retailer after you discover 'not bright enough'...quite stupid way to do business! As the consumer, what can I expect in the way of brightness from any of these products?!

The guys writing articles about these products are ill informed and not even aware of what useful information is missing from their articles! Even articles appearing in so-called photography magazines are similarly UNinformative. I place the blame on the fact that so few folks bother to buy or rent lightmeters to make objective measurements which can be published in tables comparing these products! Either that, or the writers are such rookies themselves that they have no idea what the photographic consumer is wondering about.

I agree with a lot of what you say.

LED lighting is a brilliant advance on most other types of continuous lighting (except for the discontinuous light spectrum compared to tungsten lighting) but what most people simply don't get is that, in photographic terms, it's usually the best tool for video but the wrong tool for still photography.
As you identified, the most useful measure is Lumens, not lux. But it can be further complicated by the use of the word "Watts". From innumerable posts on this subject, it's clear that many people confuse "Watt" with "Watt-second" and assume that, for example, a 300-watt continuous lamp delivers the same amount of power as a 300 watt-second flash - which it can only do with an exposure time of one second, which is of course nearly always impracticable,, and then there is of course inevitable power loss due to the fact that quite a lot of the power is output in the form of heat rather than light.

And it gets worse, because manufacturers tend to quote the "Watts" figure as a comparison to the typical wattage of a tungsten light source rather than the actual wattage. This is fine in theory, but not in practice because if, for example, a 30-watt consumption LED is quoted as 300-watt this only works if the LED light is in fact 10x more efficient in terms of output than the 300-watt tungsten light, but the cheaper end of the LED market often only has about half of the potential output efficiency.

Where did this mess come from?
Go back to the time when there were massive numbers of flash head manufacturers in China, probably around 2014. Up to that point, LED lights were primarily aimed at their rightful market, home videos. But then Godox started to dominate the flash market and nearly all other manufacturers found that their customers had gone. So they moved to LED lighting, which Godox hadn't bothered with at that time, and claimed that it was perfect for still photography. And the public believed them!

 

[Terrywoodenpic]

Led lighting is certainly improving.
But they seem to have no internationally accepted standard of power or colour quality that is useful to photographers.
Manufacturers seem to be at the stage of using what ever they can get at the lowest possible price. And packing them into cheap housings.

There probably are high quality ones available for film and TV studios. But such things do not seem to have moved down the food chain yet. But no doubt some day they will. godox have dipped their toes in the pool, so may be they will soon (eventually) come up with some thing that is both powerful enough and well colour balanced. In the way they have with their flashes.

 

[Phil V]

Led lighting is certainly improving.
But they seem to have no internationally accepted standard of power or colour quality that is useful to photographers.
Manufacturers seem to be at the stage of using what ever they can get at the lowest possible price. And packing them into cheap housings.

There probably are high quality ones available for film and TV studios. But such things do not seem to have moved down the food chain yet. But no doubt some day they will. godox have dipped their toes in the pool, so may be they will soon come up with some thing that is both powerful enough and well colour balanced. In the way they have with their flashes.

And therein lies flash's obvious advantage. People don't want to be sat under hot lights to have their picture taken (I appreciate LED's aren't as hot as tungsten), it's very uncomfortable, in fact just modelling lights can be a bit much for some people to look into.

Pro film and TV have always used massive lighting rigs, nowadays they're just a lot more energy efficient (just as large and just as bright)

 

[Garry Edwards]

There probably are high quality ones available for film and TV studios.

There are, but at film and TV studio prices.

godox have dipped their toes in the pool, so may be they will soon come up with some thing that is both powerful enough and well colour balanced. In the way they have with their flashes.

They have come up with what appears to be copies of pro LED lighting, but reviews aren't good.

And therein lies flash's obvious advantage. People don't want to be sat under hot lights to have their picture taken (I appreciate LED's aren't as hot as tungsten), it's very uncomfortable, in fact just modelling lights can be a bit much for some people to look into.

And that's one of the obvious problems. Pro talent can cope with being dazzled, ordinary people can't.

And another obvious problem is that the low power of LED lighting means that people have to use a high ISO setting. Whether the IQ is acceptable or not is subjective, but a lot of people just don't seem to understand that the high ISO setting emphasises the effect of the ambient lighting (which flash effectively kills) and makes it impossible to create the lighting, except when shooting in darkness - which makes the dazzling effect even worse

 

[wiltw]

On a different forum, someone mentioned a new generation of LED sources, which can both offer constant light as well as a 'flash' of brighter light, I did some investigation of three different ones mentioned, and NONE of their literature on the web mention brightness of light in the context that photographers can use to compare outputs...no mention of what f/stop at what aperture and ISO, only mention of Lux. Obfuscation about brightness. However I did manage find one report by DP Review about the Rotolight that provided that insight, so I extracted key points apropos to that:

A video on DP Review https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/re...leds-to-offer-loads-of-creative-color-options​

states,​

"The downside of LEDs has always been that it’s hard to make them powerful enough to match the range of applications that traditional light sources could cover, but with improved noise performance in cameras and much more useable high ISO settings, perhaps that doesn’t matter so much these days...LED light panels are generally not as powerful as standard flash units or traditional movie lights. While these Rotolight heads are more powerful than the previous models and more powerful than others in their class, we need to manage our expectations a little when it comes to flash and adjust our behavior... I considered a practical distance of 2m using a Sekonic L-558 light meter set to ISO 100, 400 and 800 in a large room at night with the overhead lights off. This isn’t a scientific set of measurements, but they will give you an idea. ...shutter speed was set to 1/60sec for both continuous and flash exposures.".​

​

..and the chart in the video shows ISO 100 values of (1/60) f/2.8 for the Rotolight. Finally, a real world meaningful comparison!​

​

But I am rather underwhelmed in comparing that to a small 500w-s Dynalite pack & head which I measured f/11 at a distance of 10'​

.., especially when I might need to stop down to f/5.6 for sufficient portraiture DOF, that forces shutter speed to 1/4 sec with the Rotalight !​

 

[Garry Edwards]

On a different forum, someone mentioned a new generation of LED sources, which can both offer constant light as well as a 'flash' of brighter light, I did some investigation of three different ones mentioned, and NONE of their literature on the web mention brightness of light in the context that photographers can use to compare outputs...no mention of what f/stop at what aperture and ISO, only mention of Lux. Obfuscation about brightness. However I did manage find one report by DP Review about the Rotolight that provided that insight, so I extracted key points apropos to that:

A video on DP Review https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/re...leds-to-offer-loads-of-creative-color-options​

states,​

"The downside of LEDs has always been that it’s hard to make them powerful enough to match the range of applications that traditional light sources could cover, but with improved noise performance in cameras and much more useable high ISO settings, perhaps that doesn’t matter so much these days...LED light panels are generally not as powerful as standard flash units or traditional movie lights. While these Rotolight heads are more powerful than the previous models and more powerful than others in their class, we need to manage our expectations a little when it comes to flash and adjust our behavior... I considered a practical distance of 2m using a Sekonic L-558 light meter set to ISO 100, 400 and 800 in a large room at night with the overhead lights off. This isn’t a scientific set of measurements, but they will give you an idea. ...shutter speed was set to 1/60sec for both continuous and flash exposures.".​

​

..and the chart in the video shows ISO 100 values of (1/60) f/2.8 for the Rotolight. Finally, a real world meaningful comparison!​

​

But I am rather underwhelmed in comparing that to a small 500w-s Dynalite pack & head which I measured f/11 at a distance of 10'​

.., especially when I might need to stop down to f/5.6 for sufficient portraiture DOF, that forces shutter speed to 1/4 sec with the Rotalight !​

I've checked "flash" output of LED lamps with a few products, almost too low to measure and certainly too low for real-world use.

I haven't tested the Rotolight claims, but Rotolight has a certain reputation. Their ambassadors seem to get much better performance from their products than actual users seem to be able to achieve, also their products apparently defy the immutable laws of physics in terms of claimed softness of light and the effects of the ISL. I'll stop writing now