Nissin Di866 MKII Professional

£200, $315

Relatively inexpensive for a ‘pro’ flashgun

Professional by name, the Nissin is mostly professional by nature as well. It has a full set of advanced flash modes including programmable repeat; a sync terminal; external battery pack socket; solid build quality; and some smart extras. For example, it’s the only flashgun to match the Metz mecablitz 64 AF-1 in offering a secondary flash tube for adding direct fill flash in bounce mode.

There’s a colour LCD screen around the back, and the display rotates automatically depending on whether you’re shooting in landscape or portrait orientation. As you’d expect, the Nissin also supports full wireless master/ slave functions. Compared with other ‘pro’ flashguns, the motorised zoom has a relatively limited range of 24mm to 105mm, but the maximum power rating of Gn 60 looks impressive, at least on paper.

Performance

In our tests, the maximum power output and TTL flash accuracy were both disappointing, and the recycling speed was sluggish. Ultimately, the upmarket feature set looks amazing at the price, but performance proves to be rather more average.