METZ MECASTUDIO BL-400 SB-KIT II
Small but powerful, Metz has produced the least expensive kit in the entire group
Despite having the most lightweight heads of any studio-based kit on test, the Metz BL-400 still packs a punch with 400Ws per head. It has a generous sixstop range that falls between the five stops of the Elinchrom and Lastolite studio kits and the seven stops of the Interfit Honey Badger. The modelling lamps are a little less bright than in the other studio kits, and don’t have a proportional mode, but you can manually adjust their intensity. Heatsensing enables cooling fans to switch on only when needed.
Power adjustments are made via the now favoured push-button switches, which work in conjunction with a digital display. A neat trick shared with the Elinchrom D-lite and ELB 400 kits is that the Metz heads can be triggered in slave mode from flashguns, ignoring pre-flash pulses. You’d expect nothing less from a company most famous for its flashguns.
Despite the small size of the heads, they still have the usual Bowens S-type accessory mount. The kit includes two 50x70cm softboxes but no RF remote trigger and, as with the Lastolite heads, there are no built-in RF receivers.
Performance
The Metz stole a lead on the other studio kits in this roundup during our tests, delivering the greatest maximum output, equivalent to Gn 72. The only catch is that recycling after a fullpower flash is relatively slow, at 2.4 seconds. At the low end of the scale, it’s able to supply a slightly less intense minimum flash power than the Elinchrom D-lite 4 heads.