Veteran Member Registered: September, 2006 Location: Ames, Iowa Posts: 774 | | Review Date: October 23, 2017 | Recommended | Price: $28.00
| Rating: 9 |
| Pros: | power adjustable to 1/128; quiet; useful features; low cost | | Cons: | | |
Please understand that this moderately-powered flash does no metering and does not participate in [P-]TTL protocol. Its power level must be manually adjusted by you. I didn't list that point as a review "con" because, well, it is exactly what it's supposed to be.
E-man covered the review essentials. This unit does the basic stuff right and is a steal at the price. It is marketed under several names; my copy is officially a "Powerextra DF-400." It currently sells on Amazon for the same price under that name as it does under the AmazonBasics brand.
This has replaced my old favorite Sunpak 383 as the go-to for off camera use. Sometimes I have it in optical slave mode to supplement a bounce flash on the hot shoe, sometimes by itself with a wireless trigger. What this lacks compared to the Sunpak (and some of my other old flash guns) is a thyristor-auto mode, but that's hardly necessary anymore in the digital age. I used automatic flash mode frequently when shooting film; now there's no shame in chimping and adjusting. What this has over the Sunpak and my other old flashes is more control over output level. Instead of only going down to 1/16 power, which used to be common, this can be adjusted to produce a subtle strobe at 1/128 power, just what you want sometimes from a second flash. Also it's inaudible, at least to my aging ears, free from the high-pitched whine that used to be a dead giveaway there was a live flash somewhere in the room.
Construction quality is acceptable for the price. The battery door feels a little rickety, but hardly any worse than that on my much pricier Pentax AF360FGZii. You could buy a lot of these for what the Pentax costs.
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Veteran Member Registered: August, 2012 Posts: 678 | | Review Date: August 22, 2017 | Not Recommended | Price: $24.00
| Rating: 4 |
| Pros: | robust construction; adjustable intensity; optical slave mode | | Cons: | No telescoping head, poor structural quality | |
This flash appears to be a re-badged Godox VT560; in fact, it bears the same model number on its back panel but costs less than half as much. The AmazonBasics Electronic Flash, we'll call it the ABF for short, is a non-dedicated, universal flash. Its intensity can be easily adjusted via two buttons on the back panel. There are eight (8) levels of intensity ranging from 1/1 (full intensity) to 1/128, with each successive level firing at half the intensity of the one before it. While this manual adjustment might be a bit off-putting to inexperienced shooters, not used to making manual adjustments, the level of control it offers can produce quite satisfying results. It is particularly well suited to digital cameras, which offer instant feedback on test shots via the rear screen. With a little practice, getting it dialed in for the lighting conditions really is a snap. The ABF also offers three triggering options: manual triggering via the hot shoe and two optical slave modes in which the flash is triggered by a master flash, either the camera's onboard flash or one mounted on the hot shoe. S1 fires the flash immediately when it detects light from the master flash and S2 ignores preliminary flashes such as those for red eye reduction, waiting to fire when the photo is taken. The ABF comes with a stand, which can allow the flash to stand on its own or attach to a tripod. The ABF's flash head tilts with four stops between zero (straight ahead) and 90 (straight upward) degrees. It also rotates left to right in a 330 degree arc. Taken together, this makes for a lot of creative possibilities. From a functional standpoint, the ABF's only real shortcoming is that it lacks a telescoping head to optimize the angle of light dispersion for the focal length of the lens being used. Structural shortcomings are addressed in the update below:
UPDATE (5 April 2018)—After eight months of light but satisfactory use, I discovered that my ABF had developed a catastrophic structural failure. The battery door had cracked in half vertically due to pressure exerted by the AA batteries inside. The door itself was in two pieces, held together by the metal contact plate on the inside. The hinged battery door was always difficult to close, a combination of the battery compartment being just a little to small for the AA batteries it was supposed to hold and the springs in the bottom of the compartment being a little too big. Amazon was very accommodating and allowed me to return it for a full refund. While I highly recommend Amazon for their excellent customer service, I can no longer recommend this particular product.
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