Quote Originally Posted by Sean Setters


Quote Originally Posted by crosbyharbison
While the FlexTT5 works ideally upon many older Canon flashes, the 580EX, 580EX II, and 430EX emit strong RF noise across the PocketWizard's frequency range, and this significantly reduces out-of-box range performance of the FlexTT5 Transceiver.In PocketWizard's research, the interference from the flash varies wildly from sample to sample; they can only guarantee that the flash will work to ~30' (~10m) in all conditions, although they do have many suggestions for increasing this considerably.

This is exactly the shortfall I was talking about because of therushed the R&D and testing before releasing the units. The performance, I've heard, using a 580EX flash is abismal. There are steps you can take to improve the situation, but they are inconvenient and somewhat costly (at least compared to everything working great out of the box). The biggest reason to pay the premium price for Pocketwizards has always been range and reliability. With the new units, the range and reliability of the units have clearly suffered (using the 580EX units, at least) and thus have stained the Pocketwizard's great reputation.


The new PW units do have some issues relating to R&D/testing, but the short range is NOT a by-product of a rushed timeline. Pocket Wizard US products have been on a particular frequency for years if not decades. Some of the recent Canon flashes emit significant RF energy on the PW US frequency band, and that's not Pocket Wizard's fault.