Review on Yongnuo RF 603 Wireless Trigger Remote by Fred Griffin

Received them tonight and tested them for a few minutes without reading the manual shows they work great . I used to have an early model of cheap Cowboystudio NPT-04 triggers and they were cool at first but didn't work reliably and also felt like they would fall apart when used on a flash stand. One of them stopped working through the hot shoe but continued to work through the cable so I wanted to replace them with something else. About 6 months ago I bought a Yongnuo 560-III flash and I really like it. Optical slave, PC connection, full manual zoom and great value for money. Oh, and a built-in wireless receiver. Finally managed to test it with the RF-603 II tonight. Without reading the manual, I switched the flash to wireless mode, put the RF-603 on my Fuji X-E2 and everything worked. Start wirelessly with no need to connect anything to the flash or install anything with a hot shoe, and no pre-flashes. Like magic. One of the improvements of the model over the previous one should be speed. I never tried the old version, but I tested this with the following setup: one RF-603 II in the hotshoe of my Fuji X100 (which has a leaf shutter and can sync corded flashes up to 1/4000), one on my SB-600 installed and my YN 560-III set to receive. Put both flashes on the table at 1/64, set the camera to f/8 and take pictures with progressively faster shutter speeds. Everything was fine except for 1/1000 s. At 1/4000 no flash can be seen in the photo. Both flashes are visible at 1/2000, but they are slightly dimmer than at slower speeds. When using the X100 with a hot shoe or corded flash I got full brightness at 1/4000s, so that tells me these triggers introduce a slight delay that is only about 1/2000s or faster. . Pretty good and fast enough for anything with a focal plane shutter of course. Haven't tried using them as a wireless trigger yet; I bought a wired model for my Nikon camera and didn't have it in the room to test. I didn't check the range either, but they worked fine, at least across the room. In general I am very happy with them. Perhaps a 1/4" head on the bottom would be an improvement, but there isn't much room for it. The thumb wheel for tightening the ground into the hot shoe is quite difficult to get to, but helps them keep a low profile. Much more powerful than what I had before and they use regular AAA batteries. 110 dollars.