Review on 📸 LightPix Labs FlashQ Q20II (Black): Compact and Powerful Flash with Enhanced Features by Mike Pettigrew

the looks and construction of this thing is pretty good, especially for the price: it's light (a bit heavier with batteries , but not bad ), it's a cool built-in and detachable transmitter base, and based on some limited and unscientific testing the flash intensity seems OK (maybe better than OK, but again I'm not measuring with any device). My main issue with this is that after days of playing, I can never really predict if pressing the shutter button will actually fire the flash. I use it from an Olympus PEN-F body, which has always worked extremely reliably with my old Oly flash. I have no idea why it's in trouble, but the fact that it does means I'm more likely to get it back. If it worked it would be a good device for its price. Update - got a replacement for the first flash drive (probably not needed). Same weird behavior. I was close to getting it back but the behavior just didn't make sense to me so while chatting with Revain support I tried to figure out what was going on. The Q20 has multiple slave modes for *optical* slavery to another flash (first and second, quite often). The status of this setting is indicated by a small LED next to the button that controls this function on the flash. If the option is set to red or green, it is configured as an optical slave. Well, I think that was the key part of my misunderstanding: to a certain extent, this setting causes the camera's hot shoe "fire" command to work either at all or intermittently. works predictably in any camera mode, which makes sense as it's a dumb flash that shouldn't have any idea what the camera is doing. I'm keeping this second one because while it's not really a serious "professional" device, it seems like it could be very useful in some situations with a remote control function. cheap stuff and the UI is weird in a lot of ways. But overall not a bad buy.