Lighting

Lights 2011-08-04

So I want some studio strobes.

Considered:

• 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 sound like 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, and their markups are kinda... bad. The US store won't sell here though. Get the lights locally and procure the accessories some other way?

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/

Remote triggering and power 2011-09-06

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.