So I am not from the UK. I don’t pretend to be from the UK. What does all of this have to do with my review? Not much. Watch the review and have fun with it. I did.
I was very disappointed that Pocket Wizard tried to make one device do everything and had a cost that was just too much to bear. The Flex system was a poor concept designed for people who know they should get their flashes off their cameras but weren’t educated enough about how that worked to actually figure out the exposure and flash output for themselves. Also they fried one of my Canon 580 EX II flash units with their Flex radio system and what is now know through out my studio as the black cloth death shroud. That didn’t make a very good impression on me so I got rid of the Flex system and went back to regular pocket wizards until I found something that I thought would work better. Perhaps if you are a person who completely uses Canon strobes and can somehow keep your flash from cooking itself to death, this system might work very well for you. Denis Reggie has a completely lifeless review of it on the Pocket Wizard website where he sings its praises but I don’t know how relevant to the photography world Denis Reggie is anymore. Wonder if they got him new flashes when the Flex’s burned out his flashes. His pictures haven’t been very exciting for some time but I suppose making a million dollars a year providing an overpriced service to the rich, famous and vapidly uninteresting might have that effect on you. He was a really interesting person to meet a few years back, but I get the impression that he’s just burned out. $50k a wedding just isn’t exciting anymore, Denis?
I bought the Radio Poppers JrX a couple weeks back and have been very impressed with their simplicity and effectiveness. I’ve taken them out on a grand tour of tough situations and they have worked quite effectively. They work well with my Canon strobes as well as Alien Bees and were bumped and bashed in and out of a car all day last week. The Radio Popper JrX case design is nice and small and making adjustments is accurate though I wish they had chosen to go with a larger set of dials for adjusting the lights. I’m searching the world right now to see if I can find another set of pot knobs that are big enough for me to use without wondering if I am even touching anything at all. This system only syncs to 1/200 of a second and does not utilize TTL flash options which is ok with me since I haven’t used TTL in years due to its inconstancy. The Radio Popper JrX are reasonably priced and I was more than happy to drop the cash to allow me to be more creative on the spot rather than manually pulling down the light to change the light output while dialing in my exposure and having clients wait. Batteries are a little unusual in that you are not going to find them at Costco, but I gather that they were trying to keep it small and required 3v dc as most other transmitters do. I typically root for the little guy and Radio Popper being the little guy has certainly stepped up with a product that impresses.