Hate to dwell on Skyports, but the timing is just rather funny...

After about a year and a half of fairly light usage, (maybe less than 2000-3000 firings), my Skyports stopped working. OK, I am a bit disappointed in the quality, but they have a two year warranty so I sent them back for repair.

Three weeks later I get a call stating that Elinchrom says it will cost me $150 to fix them since they were outside the ONE YEAR warranty period.

Luckily I went through the store from which I purchased them, and he pulled out a new set out of the box to look up the warranty card. Yep, two year warranty, even on new units. (so it is not an innocent mistake due to a change in policy)

So now the store owner has to fight with Elinchrom to get my repair done under warranty!

The company has proven to me time and time again that their products, and to an even greater extent their service, are just abysmal! This may have been a quality company at one time, but they do not treat their customers well.

I would highly suggest being wary of Elinchrom. It is possible, of course, that I am the only one that has been screwed by them multiple times... but the odds are unlikely.

I'm glad they're working out for you Don. I have actually heard a lot of good things about them before I bought them. Sadly, I got bad set of Skyports... (and a bad set of strobes, and bad tech support, and bad warranty service)

Anyway, buyer beware.

The MadTV skit came to mind for me as well, but adding to that, it seems many people find Apple synonymous with Mac, so they'll call it the Mac iPad... "Macsipad". It all just fits so poorly, I cannot imaging the marketing team or Steve would have let that through.

The mirror lockup on the K7 is a true mirror lockup. There is also the 2 second timer but I'm looking forward to trying the mirror lockup in some real world photos.

The lens correction actually works fairly well, although a bit slow. I am also hopeful that Lightroom will get to that soon and avoid the need to do in camera or to jump to Photoshop to fix the images.

I do like the much faster and quieter mirror mechanism. And of course 5+fps is nice. Not really a new function I guess. Still nice...

I would say Skyport have about the same capability and reliability as the Cactus V2s that I bought off eBay for 10% the cost of the Skyports.

In fact two years later, the Cactus work just as well as the day I got them. Skyports no longer work and have been sent back for repair (I guess I paid $200 for the warranty).
Had lots of problems with Elinchrom products and support... series of issues with strobes as well as the remotes.... they may have been a good company once but not so much any more as far as I'm concerned.


Also, it seems the K10D does not do so well with synching with the remotes. No idea why but neither cactus nor skyports sync over 1/125 with the K10D without showing signs of the shutter darkening one edge of the frame.
With wired, or PTTL triggering, there is no problem. Only when the wireless triggers were used was there a sync problem.

The K7 with the same Cactus remotes sync just fine to 1/180. Will have to see what the Skyports do when they come back.


So my guess for your problems is with the K10D. But down to 1/10 or 1/15 is pretty extreme.

Argh! Just replied but message not saved. This happened to me twice now...

Anyway, in short, thanks for the vote of confidence that it works the same for ya.
I'll trust that and with the much smaller size difference, I may switch over to DNG.

Thanks

Just got my new K7. Its a little bit of an upgrade from the K10D.
Still going through settings and new features before I do some serious comparisons.

One thing I noticed is that the Mac OS X cannot view the new PEF files yet. So I was going to save as DNG. (nice that the K7 compresses the DNG files so they are almost the same as corresponding PEF files. Thus larger file size is no longer an issue for not saving as DNG).

One questions I never really found an answer for, is whether there are disadvantages of processing DNG v.s. the actual raw files? I'm certainly not about to store the original RAW file internally with the DNG, so is there any low level pre processing of the RAW, such as with SilkyPix's de-mosaic stuff, that might not be possible with DNG?

I guess I am not that seriously picky about a minute loss of quality in 99.5% of the photos I take... but there have been a few I really needed to tweak such that using SilkyPix's de-mosaic features actually helped to get a decent image.

Would such information be lost in the DNG format? Just thinking if the DNG format is generic, something must get lost in translation.

Wow, I've never seen any with more than a sliver on one side. Well done.

Ah... I suppose I could have taken the photo before SR was actually active, eh?
I wasn't looking through the lens at the time so it is certainly a possibility.

Now that I moved to a Mac I do not have access to PhotoME. It will give me a good excuse to get it installed on the VM and see what it has to say.

Well, the shake reduction settings are DEFINITELY correct.
But as far as 2 second delay, I am only "pretty sure" that was true.

Hmmm you're right... I wonder if I did have the 2 second timer on for this one. I may have switched over after that. Probably my stupid lack of memory.

Although I am quite sure that I had turned the 2 second timer on because I thought I was possibly moving the camera while hitting the shutter. Yet the behavior did not change.

Perhaps the shake reduction does not always turn off with the 2 second delay? (i.e. time for a camera repair? i.e. time to upgrade to K7! )