PRICE: £1,049 / $1,000 PHOTTIX INDRA500 TTL

Powerful and feature-rich yet elegantly simple, the Phottix kit is keenly priced and ideally suited to life on the road

Down at ground level, the Phottix kit has a power pack with a rechargeable clip-on Li-ion battery, which connects to the flash head via a thick cable. It’s similar to the Elinchrom ELB 500 in this respect. The main difference is that the control panel is built into the head, rather than the battery pack unit.

As with the Elinchrom, you can plug two flash heads into a single power pack, with full asynchronous control, so you can set the power levels for either head independently. The standard kit comes with a single head and an additional head costs £769/$749.

The head has an eight-stop power range adjustable in 1/3rd stop increments – limiting when compared to the other kits, which offer 1/10th stop power increments. An auto TTL flash mode is available, as well as HSS, rear-curtain and even a programmable ‘multi’ stroboscopic mode.

As usual, you’ll need to buy a companion wireless remote trigger to enable flash modes like TTL and HSS. In this case, the Phottix Odin II remote trigger is the best option. It costs £125/$125 and is actually the same optional trigger that works well with the Elinchrom kit on test, available in Canon, Nikon and Sony dedicated variants. RF triggering is also compatible with Phottix Mitros+ TTL Transceiver flashguns. Another alternative for Canon shooters is the Indra500 LC TTL kit, which has built-in RF (Radio Frequency) connectivity for the Canon ST-E3 transmitter and Canon RT Speedlites.

We measured the maximum output power of the Phottix at Gn 51, falling short of the Elinchrom and Interfit heads, and it dropped off more in HSS mode, to Gn 22. There’s virtually instant recycling at most settings, but it slows to 4.8 seconds after a full-power flash. You can boost the recycling speed to 2.7 seconds in ‘fast’ mode, but this drains the battery. It takes five hours to recharge a completely drained battery and an AC adaptor for mains operation isn’t included.

Left Quick and easy interface The control panel on the back of the flash head is well designed and simple to use. The complete kit includes a flash head, seven-inch reflector, power pack and clipon battery, battery charger and a carrying bag. The Flash Centre is currently supplying two Li-ion batteries in the standard-priced kit, rather than just one