#600ex

New Post on http://www.wonderingabout.travel/canon-270ex/

Canon 270EX Flashgun

Canon 270EX is an unlikely, but great, match for the 1DX

You wouldn’t normally think of the diminutive, bottom of the range, Canon 270EX Flashgun as a natural bedfellow for the top of the range camera, the Canon 1DX, but you’d be wrong.

And for a couple of years, my ignorance had me leave this in the drawer, choosing instead to carry around the 580EX and then the 600EX.

The Canon Speedlite 600EX-RT is truly a fantastic tool, so good that we bought three along with the breathtakingly-good ST-E3 RT Speedlite Transmitter and I love them as a combo – see the photo below, this was taken at the tabletop in Thailand with the 1DX/ST-E3 RT/600EX-RT combo that I happened to be carrying that day – it’s a very competent set-up indeed.

Soft Shell Thai Crab, shot on a Canon 1DX, lit by a pair of 600EX RT Flashguns and controlled by an ST-E3 RT

But you see, the thing is, when I’m out and about with the cameras, it’s usually daytime (preferably sunny) and the flash is there for fill-in.  Therefore, I’m only using 1/100th of the power and capability of the 600EX.  Yebbut, that’s not the whole story, I hear you cry, and you’d be right.  It’s the High Speed Sync (HSS) I need, especially on these sunny days, and it’s the easiest thing just set this on the back of the 600EX in the menu system; it’s partly this HSS that I spent so much money on these flashguns for.  But the 600EX is 550g (1.2lb) with batteries and that’s quite a weight in your pocket.

I bought the 270EX in Hong Kong back in 2011 when I got tired of carrying a heavy flash, but the perceived limitation of a 1/200s sync speed meant that for nearly 3 years this flash hardly got used.

I had got lazy, just using the on-flash menu to control the advanced functions and because the 270EX has no on-board LCD screen, I had made the very wrong assumption that there was no HSS – IDIOT!!!

Three years I’ve been lumping around the 600EX when the 270EX has HSS capability, but you control it with the camera screen menu.

Menu showing HSS availability on the 1DX with the 270EX mounted

So now, at just over 200g with batteries, the 270EX lives in my Crumpler bag and is the go-to flashgun for days out on any of these 3 camera/lens street photography combos:

1DX/24-70 f2.8L

5D3/24-105 f4L

5D3/40mm STM

Yes it has approximately 1/5 of the power of the 600EX RT, but with my fill-in flash settings being typically 2-3 stops under, I have yet to want more power than the 270EX with a GN of 27 (m ISO100)

270EX HSS fill-in 1/1250s @f4

It makes me smile every time I mount the flash now, but also I’m cross at the wasted opportunities at my own daft assumption.

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