Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

I agree regarding

(1) the hard OFF switch;
(2) enabling Cyber Commander to work with rechargeable NiMh AAA's such as the popular Sanyo Eneloops;
(3) A tethered rubber plug for the SD card slot, to avoid having to put gaffer's or electrical tape over it. Or a dummy card + gasket. Something.

As for the off-camera use, I think in some cases there are advantages to the Elinchrom's approach, namely:
1) Camera shoe-attached trigger is extremely compact, sits very flat to the pentaprism, with a flexible antenna that pivots;
2) There's a USB interface enabling their Skyport software to control the strobes' parameters using a computer's big screen, mouse, and a full keyboard;
http://www.elinchrom.com/products.php?p_id=187

I think there are situations when the standalone Cyber Commander is better and others when a computer USB interface to wirelessly configure the strobes is better. Which is to say, a fully implemented system has room for both. Ultimately, I think (I hope) where the industry is going is the camera makers adopting the RF flash triggering and leveraging the DSLR's displays to configure the strobes remotely. Hopefully at that point the premier studio strobe makers would support Canon, Nikon and SONY's native interfaces by means of reverse engineering or licensing. Speaking of which it'd be nice to have a Cyber Commander with an iISO (SONY/Minolta) flash shoe mount - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IISO_flash_shoe

Regards

Alex

I really like the look of the Elinchrom computer interface with nice big easy to use buttons, I think full wireless remote control is great but worry the CC is going to be a little like controlling my SB-800's menu system (9 out of 10 times it would be faster to just walk over and use a slider on the light)

I feel old fashioned not being a fan of small LCD menu systems :oops: