A couple of weeks ago, Godox teased us with their new A1 flash trigger for mobile phones. The Godox A1 is designed to give your phone the ability to trigger their popular line of X1 compatible flash units (and various rebrands). But that tease is all we’ve seen, until now. Godox have now released some images from a studio portrait session shot using the iPhone 7 Plus, the Godox A1 and Godox QT-600II studio strobes. Of course, the quality of the shots depends entirely on the person using the camera, but they do look quite impressive.
Looking at some of the EXIF data for the shots below, I do wonder about its usefulness. Outside of a dark studio, anyway. The iPhone 7 Plus aperture is fixed at f/1.8, ISO bottoms out at 25, and they all seem to be shot at around 1/30th of a second.
That kind of setting certainly isn’t going to crush daylight. If you hope to use these outside on a bright day, then you’ll likely need to add neutral density. Still, we don’t know the final specs yet. Lighting Rumors also stumbled across this screenshot of the GodoxPhoto remote control app running on iOS. There’s been no confirmation yet as to whether or not this will be iPhone only. I’ve yet to see any photographs or screenshots from Android, though. Generally speaking, this should be easier to do for Android as they’re a more open system than iOS, so hopefully it’ll be available for both.
The app shows three groups of flashes, with adjustable power settings. It also controls the Godox range of LED video lights, and it’s available for the iPad, too But let’s have a look at those images. I have to say, I was rather impressed. I know the iPhone 7 Plus camera’s pretty decent, but I didn’t think they’d be quite this good.
That whole 1/20th & 1/30th of a second shutter speed is still bugging me, though. I do hope this isn’t the limit. It wouldn’t be impossible to work around, but it would make it a bit more of a pain for me to use on location. There has been another attempt at getting flash onto phones before. The Tric, which also has some pretty slow shutter speed limits ranging from 1/30th to 1/60th of a second depending on which device and camera you use. But Tric requires a receiver purchase for each light and there’s no remote control. Even if the shutter speed limits are similar, the A1 still has the advantage. It utilises the receivers already built into the range of Godox speedlights and strobes. So, it requires you simply buy the A1 unit itself and away you go. And as many photographers already own Godox (Flashpoint, Cheetahstand, Pixapro, etc) gear already, as well as a phone, it has a much larger potential market. As mentioned, no news yet on Android availability. Nor has there been any mention of price or an expected release date. We are expecting more information to become available in an official announcement on August 12th. [via Godox]
