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Portable Lighting? Head for the Summit
“M
ake anywhere your studio”: that’s the pitch for the revolutionary 600Ws iLux Summit 600C cordless flash head, available via Walthamstow-based distributor Photomart. Promising a minimum of 1,034 flashes at half power from the battery, this is truly a portable, fuss free solution for any photographer wanting professional lighting results with minimum hassle and expense. Indeed, the suggested SRP is an affordable £449.60 excluding VAT, and that includes a reflector, a charger, a pistol grip and sundry other useful items in the one head kit. Also included is a swish aluminium flight case. It’s available in a standard ‘S-fit’ and ‘EL-fit’ (for Elinchrom lighting system users), and what’s more Photomart promises a ‘special price’ for the trade, as it is looking to promote this very kit to resellers. Photomart will gradually be introducing more heads to its iLux range in the future, including one for E-TTL Canon users.
Distributor Photomart is proudly offering its cordless iLux Summit flash head to the trade, a relatively new product said to be an affordable match for the Profoto B1. Marketing Manager Jurie Gryffenberg and product expert Juan Silva fill us in…
Demonstration using the Summit 600 and RD300 Flash head plus the iLux fan
Be lucky with iLux “The main selling point is the fact that it’s cordless’, advises Photomart’s product expert Juan Silva. “It’s 100% wireless. Yes, you can buy a battery pack to power your heads, but battery packs cost between £500 and £900. And if you go for the cheaper £500 version you will be able to get only 500 ‘pops’ from one head, or if you’re using two heads that goes down to about 300 pops.” The beauty with the iLux Summit is that its little battery actually sits on the head, so much more portable than a 5 kg power pack. “That little battery will give you on half power more than a thousand pops. I did tests four times, and the average was 1,034 pops. “Half power will give you a four metre distance from your subject, shooting at ISO100 and an aperture of f/8, which is what the majority of people shoot at, at that distance. Last week I was in Dubai doing a demo and one chap wanted to try a close cover shot to check the colour balance of the head. He was shooting at a metre and the power was down to 1/64th. So that got me thinking
Above: iLux is backed by effective marketing
Below: the head which looks like a regular studio monobloc but takes its power with it
Watch BPI News for details of the first E-TTL Summit flash from iLux!
you can actually shoot 6,000 pops from a full charge easily. Potentially when you go on location, with one little battery you can shoot 1,000. That may not sound like much but if you are truly going to be taking1,000 shots on a shoot then you are going to need a good crew of people assisting you rather than doing it on your own.” The head was launched four months ago at The Societies (SWPP) Convention late January, and the latest deal offers a half price additional battery for the iLux Summit. “One of the guys in Dubai told me that he’d just had a look at the Profoto stand that was opposite ours and saw the B1, and wondered what the difference between that and the iLux was. To put it in lay terms, everybody would like to drive a Mercedes S Class, but I’m a Toyota man, so therefore I’ll be using the iLux wireless system. The Profoto is about £2,000 whereas ours is £500. “The other thing is that our flash is very fast. It will give you 1/2,000th of a second on manual. But if you were to use the assist programs, the slowest is 1/2,000th and it goes all the way to 1/11,000th of a second, so you can actually freeze movement.” So who should you be pitching this kit to? “Professionals are finding that they use it a lot on location and it’s much better than having to carry a heavy battery pack, or to be limited by the length of the cables. With this one it hasn’t got any cables so you can take it anywhere, that’s a huge advantage. The range of the receiver to transmitter is about 100 metres, so that is another plus. “Quality wise, it is also built of aluminium. Whilst the lights are made in China, the flash tube is German manufactured, and the capacitors are made in Japan. “We’ve cherry picked the best components in order to have a good product. Each manufacturer has their own version but the Summit is slightly different. We’ve tweaked the recycling time and the flash duration and things like that. The specification is different and the components are different as well.” www.photomart.co.uk
To place your stock order for the ILux Summit 600C in S-type mount now get in touch with the sales guys at Photomart on 0208 527 6006 10 June 2014 | BPI News