Paul C. Buff gear

This page is mostly about the Buff range of gear. If you want to browse their wares, do yourself a favour and use the US homepage.

When it comes to purchase time, you have the fun of dealing with the Australian homepage, which will drive you batty.

Site can be a bit slow
CMS/commerce system is a free off-the-shelf thing with haphazard theming
Product listings are really fugly
Actual product pages contain almost no information

Nice people running it though.

On buying locally

Very expensive »show some US/AU comparisons »show some US/AU comparisons (note that this doesn't take into account non-parity between the currencies)
- AU$710 vs US$500 for an E640
- AU$400 vs US$240 for the Vagabond
- AU$172 vs US$90 for a spare vagabond battery
- AU$70 vs US$30 for the CSXCV transceiver module
- AU$277 vs US$180 for the Cyber Commander transmitter
Monsieur Buff has a very thorough explanation for the differences in price
Warranty
Quick shipping

Reviews

This is a list of sub-pages:

Buying lights 2011-08-04

So I wanted some studio strobes. »Read on »Read on

I considered a few brands:

Elinchrom
Glanz (cheapies)
Paul C. Buff

Buff makes the Alienbees series, which might be a more familiar name to some. They look to be a little cheaper than Elinchrom, should be at least on par in terms of product quality, and the company sounds like they're really smart, switched-on people.

There are some other big brands out there like Bowens, Profoto and Multiblitz. They're hella-expensive though.

The Buff gear looks like the way to go. They have a local distributor, but their markups are kinda... bad. The US store won't sell here though. Get the lights locally and procure the accessories some other way? Maybe?

Item	US	Local
lights	500	700
stands	40	74
brollys	30	66
reflectors	15	38
grid	25	57
receivers	30	54
commander	180	260
carry bags?	13	??

Popped an order in, 2011-08-02. Website is... not impressive. Two timeout errors about being unable to contact the payment provider before finally succeeding, and a blank section where it's meant to say "A confirmation email was sent to the address: <BLANK>"

Tried again on 2011-08-03, after giving them a call. They confirmed my suspicion that the website was having issues yesterday, I feel much better now. Placed the order again, no hassles this time. \o/

2x	Einstein	E640	$699.00 each	1398.01
2x	7" reflector	7AB/R	$37.40 each	74.80
1x	10-degree honeycomb grid	HG10	$57.20 each	57.20
Shipping				70.00
Package discount				-30.60
Total				1569.41

Remote triggering and power 2011-09-06

The lights are pretty cool, but using a PC sync cable sucks big time, and optical slaving is less than ideal. Remote power control would be nice too. »Read on »Read on

The Buff range of gear uses a triggering system of their own creation named Cybersync. It's pretty badass.

Centralised control from a single commander device
Up to 16 individually addressable channels (lights, or groups if you're using 1st-gen gear that does unidirectional communication)
Built-in flashmeter in the commander
Total control of all features of 2nd-gen lights (the Einstein model)
Status feedback from 2nd-gen lights (eg. ready/non-ready charge status)

Another cool thing about Buff is that they have portable power solutions. That are actually portable. And pretty affordable too.

So an order went in.

1x	Cyber Commander	COMMANDER	$266.20 each	266.20
2x	Cybersync CSXCV	CSXCV	$53.90 each	107.80
1x	Vagabond Mini	HG10	$399.00 each	399.00
Shipping				88.48
Coupon discount				-38.65
Total				822.83

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Paul C. Buff gear

On buying locally

Reviews

Buying lights 2011-08-04

Remote triggering and power 2011-09-06