Digital Home Thoughts: External Wireless Flash Metz 28 CS-2

"Nothing will ruin a shot quicker than on-camera flash. Unless you’ve got an SLR, though, indoors you usually have no choice — it’s either shiny and straight-on with flash, or dark and blurry without. No longer! Meet our newest friend: The German-engineered Metz 28 CS-2 Digital Slave Flash. (What will the naming geniuses at Metz think of next?) Here’s how it works: The tiny Metz is an external flash that runs on AAAs. As soon as your camera’s own flash fires, the Metz fires, too. Automatically. Without wires. Within milliseconds. (Speed of light and all that.) Since it’s far, far more powerful than your on-camera flash, your room fills light, and photos look, well, normal. Since it’s wireless, you can detach it and put it away from your camera, hold it in one hand while you take a photo with another, point it back, up, down, whatever. It’s even got a handy fold-up sliding rail that screws into your tripod socket."



Wow, this is a very cool solution... while DSLRs, etc have a relatively powerful flash (and additionally have the option of adding on an external flash), point-and-shoots are not as lucky. They have relatively week flashes and you end up with shiny and straight-on flash, or dark and blurry pictures (without flash). The Metz 28 CS-2 appears to be triggered by a flash of light and runs on an independent set of AAA batteries. So you can place the flash somewhere in a room where you are taking pictures and your camera flash will now have some often-needed backup. I would love to try it out to see what kind of ambient light it would give off.