Who ever knew that an electronics company could screw up so bad? I suppose if Apple did it with one of its iPhones, then a much smaller company that pretty much no one has ever heard of, unless you are in the photo business, can do it too. Pocket Wizard. The industry standard for wireless transmission. A few years back Pocket Wizard came up with the brilliant plan to offer off camera TTL flash at high speed but with the magic of radio instead of flashes of light from the flash itself. And so the PocketWizard FlexTT5 Transceiver for Canon was born. But it was born prematurely and needed some time in the NICU. A long time as a matter of fact. It did not work with the flagship flash from Canon. The top of the line Canon Speedlite 580EX II flash was left in the cold and would not work with the Flextt5. Oops. But never fear, the radical thinkers at Pocket Wizard came up a cloth bag to solve all of your problems. Or so I was told. It didn’t work very well and was not a consistent solution. Finally, after Pocket Wizard never really admitting that they had made a huge mistake they came out with another solution: The PocketWizard AC7: A black plastic partial case that is shielded which the 580 EX II slides into. I was a little fearful that this was going to be another Pocket Wizard failure but it works well. No, I haven’t done much of a distance test but it works very consistently at 50 feet and I’ve read other science types who have verified it working at hundreds of feet. I’ve never really had a need for it being more than 50 feet away so I consider this shield a success. Good job, Pocket Wizard. Kudos!
