Quantum 4 Triggers

I'm new to the world of studio lighting and working with some older Norman equipment, but one of the things I picked up were several Quantum 4 triggers. I think I have four transmitters and three receivers(one receiver for each of the power packs). All are set up on channel "D", and in my limited testing everything works fine.

 

I can't seem to find a lot of discussion on these units. As is typical of Quantum stuff, they seem plenty sturdy and the range seems good on them.

 

I know these are older units, but is there any particular reason why I should consider a newer alternative? At least for now I'm not doing time-critical stuff and also am not currently doing portraits so if something does come up I don't miss a shot or look like an idiot while I try to troubleshoot it. The only thing I've run was a set of dead batteries in a receiver, which of course was easy to fix(even though it stumped me a bit since it had worked fine a few hours earlier) but even that's not a HUGE deal as I have wall cords for the receivers if I need them.

 

Is there any downside to continuing to use these, and should I budget for a more up to date system like Pocket Wizards?

 

At least with my current needs I could get away without any trigger at all, but I also like not having a PC cord trailing my camera. Plus, there's the fact that at least with DSLRs I'm a bit unsure about feeding these old packs directly into the camera. When I was test firing them before bringing them home, I brought along a D1X, which I have more out of collectible interest but wouldn't be heartbroken if I fried the sync circuit. It was fine through about 40 test shots, but there again I don't want to push my luck.

If they are working, keep using them. Your lights are too old to work with anybody's TTL flash control, so you wouldn't gain much by replacing the Quantums. If you were going to open a full time studio you would probably want newer lights and radio triggers/receivers.

Thanks-use them I will!

 

Are there any pack/head combos that do TTL? I could see it being simple enough with something like the Nikon film system where it just quenches when it detects enough light hitting the film, but iTTL or whatever the Canon equivalent is for digital seems like it would be a royal pain.

 

For now I'm limiting myself to playing with digital just to see what effects positioning has, and I've been adjusting the exposure(or really just the aperture with the camera parked at base ISO) until the histogram tells me it's right. My Minolta incident meter supposedly does flash metering, although I've never tried it, and I also have a small stash of FP-100c that I can use with medium format. At least as the flash meter goes, too, Mamiya was nice enough to put the bellows compensation on a handy scale on the side of RB67 bodies. I know I'm still stuck with a tape measure and manual calculations in LF, although that's not a factory now as I don't have the correct sync cords for any of my lenses(I need to break down and buy a nice modern 150mm in a good shutter with a PC socket :) )

 

BTW, I have a bunch of medium format prisms for different systems(and in different formats) that have velcro(loop side) on the front of them. I'd wondered for a while what that was for. All of the Quantum transmitters I got have velcro(hook side) on the back of them. Suddenly, it all makes sense :) . I've not seen this discussed anywhere, but I'm guessing that velcro "side" chosen for the different parts is something of an unofficial standard like using white/silver for unexposed and black for exposed on sheet film holders.

IMO, TTL is of little value with multiple light setups. There's no TTL system that's intelligent enough to set the "correct" ratios for key, fill, hairlight, kicker, etc. entirely automatically. So it's down to the human operator to control the power of each lamp.

 

Being able to control the power of each light from the camera position is a nice luxury, but not really essential.

 

In short, would I (or you) trust any TTL system to give the desired lighting balance? About as much as I'd trust a trained ape to focus and compose the camera for me!