When I first started reading about off-camera flash at Strobist, the biggest thing that baffled me was… How do I get the flash off the camera? David Hobby suggested Pocket Wizards, and while I’m sure they are awesome I wasn’t ready to plunk down that kind of cash just yet. Then, he started talking about other solutions involving PC cords, and that’s where he lost me…

I actually gave up on the site and the whole idea of lighting for a few months, and when I came back I picked up on the suggestion of “eBay” triggers – or basically cheap alternatives to Pocket Wizards. I found the Opteka wireless triggers on Amazon, and I decided to give them a shot.

Why Did I Pick These?

Too things drew me to the Opteka triggers.

One is that they are cheap. I think the prices are pretty standard for these off-brand eBay triggers, but in general I liked paying around $25 for a starter kit and an extra $10-15 for extra receivers. That beats $1-200 per receiver for Pocket Wizards, eh?

But what really helped me wrap my mind about the off-camera flash was the compatibility of this trigger with my camera. Although there’s an option to use PC-cords, it works with any standard hot shoe. The trigger mounts on the hot shoe of the camera, and the flash mounts on top of the receiver.

For other people, this might not be such a problem… but I have a Canon t1i (which has no PC connection) and I started with a Canon 430 EX II (which also has no PC connection). I was understandably confused, then, when the off-camera flash solutions all seemed to start with PC cables…

The hot shoe capability also makes this compatible with all kinds of old flashes. I dug my parents old Pentax flash out of the basement for a bit of experimentation before I ended up buying two Vivitar 285′s. All I needed was an extra receiver for each flash, and they worked fine with my Canon camera and other Canon flash.

What Was I Worried About?

Well, cheap obviously brings with it the risk of poor quality. There weren’t a lot of customer reviews on Amazon, but they were generally good. One problem that people generally raised, if there was one, was reliability. So I wondered, would these triggers fire every time I needed them to?

I was prepared to put up with a little flakiness, as long as they were generally reliable.  I mean, isn’t 95% good enough?  Would it be the end of the world if a handful out of every hundred pictures had the flash mis-fire?

Should I Have Been Worried?

Umm… no. Reliability has not been an issue at all.

I think over the next few weeks I’m going to sit down and test these transmitters methodically, to see if I can get an error rate out of a couple hundred frames. But I’ve rarely if ever noticed problem. On the few occassions that they did fail to fire, I determined it was one of two problems – dying batteries in the receiver or dying batteries in the flash.

Solution? Keep fresh batteries in your gear, and keep fresh batteries in your bag, duh. That said, you can take a lot of pictures before the batteries run down in the receivers. If you regularly recharge your batteries, you’ll have no problem at all with reliability.

On the other hand, when you look at the construction of it you can tell it is a bit… cheap. There’s basically a thin plastic case around a circuit board. I wouldn’t expect it to hold up to a beating. In fact, the battery door on one of my receivers has become a little loose, and I need some tape to hold it in place.

Bottom Line

By now, I’ve acquired a transmitter and three receivers. I’ve been using them for five or six months now. Reliability is not an issue at all (although I haven’t really stressed the range on them, so I don’t know when/if that will become an issue). Build quality does seem a bit cheap, but you get what you pay for… it’s not a lot of money to replace a receiver if you smash it to itty bitty pieces.

Would I like a set of Pocket Wizards? Sure. But it cost me about $50 to put together this three-flash wireless set. Four Pocket Wizards would cost upwards of $600 or $700.  Ouch.

If you’re looking for a starter set of wireless triggers so that you can start working with off-camera flash, the Opteka set will work just fine. In the big scheme of wireless flash solutions, it may not be 5 stars… but it absolutely does what it’s supposed to do – be a cheap, reliable way to trigger your speedlights from a distance.