I think they'll wake up a sleeping Speedlite. I've had more problems on the transmitter end, especially when it's a Flex and the camera underneath goes to sleep. When the camera wakes up, my Flexes were ignoring it. I'll see if I can lab it up this weekend and give you an answer.


They are definitely units to drool over, but I almost think you need a laptop on-site if you're doing anything more than a simple single-camera setup. The new auto-camera-detection simplifies some things (I had to dig out my Rebel one time when her 40D was in the shop and my 1D3 was on loan for two days; second-curtain sync was a disaster because of the different shutter timings so I had to keep my shutter speeds between 1/100th [faster than my SCS threshold at the time] and 1/200th [to stay safely below hyper-sync territory which was programmed for a different camera]), but sacrifices some of the improvements (1/400th is the upper limit for hyper-sync in auto camera detect; the 1D3 can easily handle 1/500th but has to be chosen manually).


I had an event recently where it was a three-camera four-flash shoot (camera 1 had a high umbrella; camera 2 had a high umbrella; camera 3 had an on-camera flash and a stand-mounted flash - I was one Flex shot to put both off-camera). Thankfully I'd programmed some of my Flexes to transmit on different channels, so I used those to train the receivers onto the different channel, giving me three separate channels on-site without a laptop to reprogram. That does mean that I have to be a little regimented about my gear - each unit is lettered (Minis) or numbered (Flexes). Flexes 1 and 2 are programmed to receive on my typical channels but transmit on different channels, so they get assigned as third-camera transmitters or under-flash receivers. Flexes 3/4/5 are programmed to TX/RX on my typical channels, so they're all-purpose units.


To me, the ZoneController is more than just versatility: it's a money-saver, time-saver, arm-saver, and Mini/Flex-saver. To recreate the supposed ZC functionality, I have to commit a 580 flash onto my on-camera Mini/Flex ($400 vs. estimated $75), navigate the 580's menus (slower than setting flash menus via the camera's screen, far slower than just spinning some knobs on the ZC), weighing down the camera, and stressing the connections above/below the on-camera Mini/Flex. Plus, the on-camera flash still flashes, at least the last time I quickly played with it (while outside in inch-an-hour snowfall), yuck. We recently did some holiday family portraits for friends as a two-camera four-flash shoot (key, fill, 2xBackground). We had to do manual flash settings on all four flashes to get the balance we wanted. Then, if we wanted/needed to change DoF, we had to change aperture and inverse-change ISO. If we wanted to have E-TTL, we would have had to buy two more flashes ($800, or perhaps $560 if we just bought a pair of 430s to serve as our background flashes). An estimated $150 for a pair of ZoneControllers would have been so much better.