Flash Shoot Off.

[Village Idiot]

Vivitar has had some mare QC issues over the past few years with about 50% of the strobes in one of their batches being defunt.

If you want something with a company that stands behind their product, check out the LumoPro LP160. It'll be a little more, but it has even more features and Midwest Photo Exchange (MPEX.com) is a good company to deal with. The strobe was actually designed with the whole Strobist thing in mind. Moishe from MPEX even went so far as to take every single Vivtar 285HV sold out of the box and test them prior to shipping them out when the whole botched quality thing was found out to be an issue. That's dedication to customer service.

 

[cgipson1]

I have two of the Yongnuo YN-560's I use for background lighting, etc... and they do a good job. As Derrel mentioned, they do have built-in slaves.. and are Preflash compatible (they ignore the pre-flash on one setting) and also have a full manual slave setting. Easy to set power and zoom on them.

 

[kassad]

I located the official Yongnuo 560 manual at http://www.yongnuoebay.com/sm/yn5601.pdf

and one for the 285HV at http://ec1.images-amazon.com/media/i3d/01/A/man-migrate/MANUAL000011531.pdf

The Yongy is newer and more high-tech looking, and has finer control settings in terms of power output and flash head zoom. The thing that would annoy me is the auto-shutoff on the Yongy....ewww...I would not want that, ever!!! It says the delay can be lengthened, but I would want power-saving to be disabled totally. Power-saving auto shutoff is what I refer to as the "advanced picture-misser" feature...

The power saving mode can be turned off on the yn-560. It also has a sync port and can take an external battery pack. There is a new model called the yn-560 Mark II. As far as I have been able to tell it just adds a LCD screen.