Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

With or without HSS/Hypersync, a Singh-Ray Vari-ND is an awesome tool. I love mine.

And I ordered 2x PowerMC units this morning, too.

It's the camera makers that made it backwards. It comes down to whether you want real world power from a decent CCD camera at 1/3000 to 1/8000 second shutter speeds, or 1-2 WS and a whole lot of trickery and unpredictability from HSS or Hypersync, etc.

You're not going to have a lot of luck shooting basketball with any of the HSS tricks . . . that takes some significant flashpower. HSS is OK for shooting humming birds and other things from three feet IMHO.

I just want to overpower the sun and still shoot wide open for portraits. Which is where the Vari-ND comes in.

I agree about the ND comment and that's the solution I would use if I were shooting much. But NDs aren't much fun.

HHS is usable for getting your shutter speed up and resulting shallow depth of field for sunlight shots and getting a little fill. But a lot of shooters think they can get a lot of flashpower at high shutter speeds. Unfortunately, if one knows the physics of HSS schemes, for every stop of shutter speed increase you get you lose one stop of flashpower, so you never really gain much if any improvement in the flash to sun ratio.

Whether true HSS or Hypersync, etc, you are producing flashpower over a rather long period of time, then just using a tiny slice of it for the actual exposure. So from a 60WS speedlight, for instance, you may only have 1WS or so of actual flashpower at high shutter speeds.

Tricking studio flash units with faux HSS gets you a bit more power than a speed lights, but with a lot of tricky timing and limits of flashpower before you start getting uneven exposure across the frame.

With a CCD camera (like D40-D70 etc, or G11 types with electronic shutter, and Einstein you can easily get wireless shutter speeds in the 1/2000 second range along with 200-300WS of power with no ill effects other than the image limitations of the CCD sensor. I keep checking on the latest G11 types but they only stop down to about f8. One day the camera makers will do a CMOS sensor with electronic shutter and solve all this.

I sure hope so. I mean, hope it's at least on their radar... it could be the next musthavefeature/gamechanger/pickyourcliche for whoever figures it out first.

Hopefully it's Nikon; I don't want to have to switch, lol.

I'm with you on this. Seems like they rehash the same set of features on a near monthly basis instead of actually innovating. But that's the global corporate way.

Singh-Ray + Einstein + PLM + hazy sun = moonlight. ;)

HSS is low on my priority list too, but others sure seem to need it. FWIW I see that B&H has this head with a "Quick Mode" HSS hack built-in:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/6 ... _Head.html

I assume power is limited.

Just a thought... rather than trying to make one big tube flash on & off quickly, why not use several small tubes firing in rotation, so each one could burn longer.

The description says it is at the lowest power setting, which is 6.25Ws

I would be happy with very low ISO (ISO 25 or lower) settings if they cannot perfect global shutters. This won't help action in high ambient light, but would be awesome for portraits.

Lot's of hype and omissions here. You can't get a 400WS flash and a 650 shot battery in a 2lb flash. Ohhhh they forgot to mention the extra required $540 battery pack and charger, or the weight of the battery pack.

Also, a stream of flash bursts at 6WS total will not give you anywhere near 6WS of actual exposure at fast shutter speeds. By all means I think everyone should go spend $1100 on this Chinese light.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/6 ... _Head.html