METZ MECASTUDIO BL-400 SB-KIT II
Small yet mighty, this incredibly compact kit is no lightweight when it comes to maximum flash output
Like Elinchrom, Metz is a company that has a long and illustrious history in flash. For the German outfit, it’s mostly for flashguns, with a heritage stretching back to 1952. The BL-400 flash heads aren’t much bigger than some flashguns, and the lightest of any on test, at just 1.2kg each. BL-200 (200Ws) heads are also available but this kit contains two of the 400Ws heads.
Surprisingly, given their compact nature, the Metz heads gave the most powerful output of anything in the group during our tests, at Gn 72. However, recycle speed after a full-power flash was also the slowest, at 2.4 seconds. That’s more than a second slower than for the Elinchrom and Interfit heads.
As with all others on test apart from the Lumen8 heads, the BL-400 uses pushbutton controls and a digital display for its interface. It’s particularly neat and tidy, and very easy to get to grips with. As you might expect from a company with Metz’s history, these heads share the Elinchrom’s feature of an ‘intelligent slave mode’. This enables the heads to be triggered from a flashgun, while ignoring pre-flash pulses. It’s a neat trick but built-in RF receivers and a remote controller are sadly lacking. More annoyingly, there’s no proportional setting for the modelling lamp, so you have to adjust the intensity manually.
An unwelcome aspect of downsizing is that the lighting stands only extend to a maximum height of 2m. They literally come up short when shooting tall people standing up. On the plus side, the two rectangular softboxes are of good proportions, measuring 50x70cm.