Elinchrom Skyport Flash triggers

I had been living with eBay triggers for triggering my Alienbee and my hotshoe flash off camera. This month I finally started charging for portrait work and my first purchase with my profits were the Elinchrom Skyport triggers ($190 from B&H). They come with a nice little case for holding the reciever, transmitter, and all the various sync cables that come with them. It is not big enough for the recharger which also has about three different heads on it for charging in basically any country. I did still have to order a Hotshoe to miniphone cord (~$20) from www.flashzebra.com to connect to the Nikon Sb600. B&H was out of stock for the paramount cord version, so I found flashzebra to be a great alternative. And at last, I am free of having any PC connections in the system. o power the units, the transmitter has a watch style battery, but the recievers have a rechargable battery in them that is unfortunately not user replaceable. Elinchrom does sell other units which can fire a camera and attach to a computer so that the entire system can be run remotely from the computer.

My set arrived on Friday night, so my first opportunity to use them was yesterday. The Skyports triggered the Alienbee B400 unit flawlessly fired for over 900 shots. My working distance was less than 10 ft, using a shutter speed of 1/200. I have seen some reviews where people complained that the sync speed was not as advertised. They claim to sync up to 1/1000, but that really depends on your cameras sync speed (mine is 1/500), most are 1/250. I also left the aerials down for my shoot. When I hooked into the SB600, it seemed like they needed a few minutes to get comfortable with each other. It would fire once, then nothing until I turned the SB600 off and then back on. It may have been that I didn't have the Hotshoe completely seated. So I refit everything, and the SB600 unit fires every time now. I did do a quick test of sync speed later, and I was able to sync with the Sb600 at 1/1000 with no dark portions of the frame. That was totally unexpected for me. I thought 1/500 would be my upper limit with a D50.

I am really satisfied with the Skyport system. These were a 50% cost savings over a set of Pocket wizards, and these things are much smaller. There is a really good review of them here that was linked from the strobist site. Here are a few pics from me of my set so you can see the sizes.

I know I only have limited experience with them, but if anyone has something they want me to check out with them, let me know. I have access to some Canon and other Nikon equipment if needed.