Radio Poppers First Look
We’ve been waiting on these to help take our lighting and photography to the next level. At OSP West, we got a chance to get a live demo of Kevin King’s Radio Popper. At DavidHam, we currently use the industry standard Pocket Wizards but always wished we had the ability to control the flash output using the FEC on our camera instead of manually on each flash head. When you think of how many you may use through a dark room, you can see why we pray for more control. Canon has the ST-E2 infrared based solution and Nikon has their own, but both systems are highly unreliable because they require line of sight. That’s where the Radio Popper comes in to answer our prayer. The flagship P1 model is shown in the follow pictures.
Radio Poppers basically intercepts the infrared signal our camera flash or Canon’s ST-E2 system puts out and transmit that data via radio. All this has to happen in real time with virtually no latency in order for the remote flash to sync with the shutter curtain. Because the E-TTL or ITTL information gets transmitted to your remote flash, all the smart logic Canon and Nikon programmed into their gear is utilized to best expose your photo. And if you need more or less light…a simple FEC change on camera is all you need to do. Very slick.
Like the old generation Pocket Wizard, there is a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter attaches via velcro to your hot-shoe flash or ST-E2 as shown in the picture and “magnetically” picks up the TTL info. You also have your choice of two antenna sizes. The short one shown, and a longer one if you need more distance. On the flash receiving end, you have a Radio Popper receiver with a detachable fiber optics cable (shown with the red arrow) that serve to relay the infrared back to the optical receiver of your flash unit.
During the demo, the prototypes work really well and triggered the flash placed in the next room. Some things we would like to see in future revision is some mini jacks like those found on Pocket Wizard in case we want to hook up studio strobes and simply trigger them in “dumb” mode. Also, the ability to have multiple channels or some sort of pairing mode so multiple transmitter could be used without conflicts. Additionally, maybe some thoughts to better mounting options that velcro could be devise. Having said all that, we recognize the awesome achievement Kevin is able to bring to the photographic front with these Radio Popper and we can’t wait to see what the future has in store.
Like I said, the Poppers shown here are still prototypes and I know Kevin said that some of the element were hand drilled and assembled. The machine assemble units should be even more refine than the units shown in these pictures and I am not sure what final design changes may be reflected in those. The good news is that Kevin expects the manufacturing run for these should be happening soon and we can not wait to get our hands on some.
