Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

Well, I know one photographer who poo-poos any remote power adjustments. He insists on "seeing" the light from the light position as he adjusts it. But... bu my standards, he is "crazy", in more ways than one. Love him anyway.

Personally, I've found that being able to run everything from wherever I am is a Godsend. It makes me more app to both "experiment" and to "fine tune" the tried-and-true lighting setups. You may think it's just "time/walking savings", but that savings starts to affect the way you think about the shot.

Oh, and there's a few other big advantages to a CC, especially if you have a mixed environment (I have old White Lightning Ultra 600 and 1200 units, an X3200, and Einsteins).

• Improved power control range on your Bees. The wired remote emulates the panel on the Bees: 5 stops of control range, full to 1/32 power. The CSR+ receivers and Cyber Commander increase that to 6.3 stops, full to 1/75 power. If you ever do shallow DOF work, you can open up 1.3 stops more than you could before.
• Better modeling light tracking. You can spec the lights so that the modeling lights on the 150, 300, or 600 W-S Bees have the same ratio of flash to modeling power as the Einsteins.
• Modeling light bracketing. Say you've got your main at 1/4 power, your fill at 1/8. Right on the right joystick, and you're in the modeling light menu. Left on the left stick, you're on "all". Up 2 stops, and the modeling lights are now full and 1/2 power, same ratio as the flashes, but 4x the power you had before.

Well, at Elinchrom, "the future" is where Paul Buff was 15 years ago. Seriously. I used to have a Paul Buff "CompuScene" system.

There's two things wrong with the statement "The economics of making a physical interface vs. a computer app can't be favorable."

• The physical interface (Cyber Commander) has "photographic hardware" built in. It has a pretty decent incident light meter and a hot shoe mount. "Economics" aside, the "ergonomics" of being able to fire your flashes from your light meter is sufficient justification for a Cyber Commander style device. Ask the people who have been using Sekonic light meters with built in Pocket Wizard transmitters for a decade. To me, it feels like, if Elinchrom had actually talked to some photographers, they wouldn't have build a WiFi to Skyport "gateway", they would have built a little box with a Skyport transceiver and a light meter sensor that direct connected to an iPhone or iPad.
• Assumptions about what would cost more only hold true if it were the same company making the Cyber Commander style device and the WiFi to remote protocol gateway. Elinchrom charges $111 for the ELS USB RX SPEED USB interface. That's only half the gateway: one transceiver (the Skyport) and no power supply. It's pretty much what a CSXCV is, except Paul managed to do it for $29.95. I shudder to think what it will cost when Elinchrom adds a WiFi transceiver and manages to package it all up so that the two 2.4GHz transceivers don't overload and desense each other. After all, ELS Transmitter SPEED costs about twice what CST costs.

thanks Joseph.
my order will not ship for a couple/few weeks yet so I have time to re-consider.
Paul

Joseph W - I don't want to fall into the trap of telling Paul how to design his products.

But if not-exactly-cutting-edge Elinchrom has an iPad app, then that has to tell us something. Phase One and Profoto have just announced a remote control feature for Capture One. It's a pretty obvious trend.

I'm a happy customer, not one of those who gripes and snipes at every product glitch. But I think the CC interface is going to look really primitive in a couple of years. Two 5-way joysticks to control multiple lights... it would be the wave of the future if this were 1985.

That said, I'm really pleased to see Paul working with LPA to control the Einsteins through Pocket Wizards. If Paul can't crank out as many new products as we all want, then hopefully he'll find other ways to enable the system to grow.

My wife's Infiniti is 90% digital, and I hate it. Give me buttons, dials & knobs! An iPad app might be of some value for studio work, but I certainly don't need one more thing to drag around while on location. The iPad, by the way, may not always be king of the hill.

But just what do these "cutting edge" products do under computer control? Do they give the computer or iPad have a built in flash meter and the ability to display f-stop readings on the screen, or to bracket in groups and f stops and all that CC does? I think when one compares what the actual capabilities are, one will quickly see Cyber Commander/Einstein is well beyond anything else by a decade.

Gee . . . remote control via iPad . . . sounds pretty 80's and rudimentary to me.

Paul, apologies if I insulted.... the CC does all those things, but it doesn't do them in a way that's practical to use during a shoot. Maybe I work too fast, maybe I'm the only one who doesn't like it, I dunno. But my lights are 90% PCB products, and the CC stands out as the one device that causes all the interruptions. I'm a former Unix admin, I can figure out how to use it. But I can't figure out how to use it quickly. I can't seem to prevent it from causing interruptions if I hit the wrong joystick and shut off the power instead of the modeling light, or if I adjust a group when I intended to adjust a single light. I've tried adjusting the lights manually and just using the CC for metering... but if I accidentally hit "refresh" (which is on the same joystick as the meter), I lose my setup. Sometimes all the lights go to standby, and I have to navigate through several screens to turn them back on. Embarrassing as heck when you have a live subject, and something similar has happened in every shoot that we've used the CC.

The LG4X is a good interface... doesn't do much, but does it well. Anybody can figure it out, nobody can screw it up. Advanced features are nice but they shouldn't interfere with making the basics... basic.

I don't know if the answer is an iPad app, or a bigger device with more knobs, or a USB interface and computer app, external partnerships, or what. You're the CEO, I'm the customer, I'm just giving feedback.

No apologies needed. It's just that the higher technology and feature set of a product like CC invariably lead to a longer learning curve an shake out period. My comment was the sheer technology and capability of CC is far beyond the simple feature set of what was referred to as being "advanced". We've been doing remote studio lights since the 80s and the rest of the industry has just recently discovered this technology.

I know what you mean though . . . I wear a Timex watch because I got tired of wasting my time having to read the manual to set digital watches.

ahem...

how about a GUI kinda like the Profoto studio plugin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mONMK0Cd ... r_embedded

Notice the simplicity, function set and ease of operation.

Yeah, baby, I can see the PCB version on my iPad2!


This is the future...

i think i would enjoy my CC even more if a software upgrade gave us a few assignable hotkeys. a doubleclick to the "likghtsettings" page or "select all" that toggles back to the most recently used single light. yup, a few assignable buttons would be nice but then we would have to buy upgraded CCs.

Thanks again/again Joesph for your time and information. Your reply is just what I had hoped for. The information in your reply alerted me to "added" benefits of the Cyber Commander system that I simply was not aware of though I hoped may exist.
Take care.
Paul