False Advertising

After much waiting, I decided to jump on the Strobist movement bandwagon and get myself into off camera lighting via a set of the venerable "ebay triggers". I had heard very good things about a certain local ebay seller and upon seeing a listing of his for "Wireless Hot Shoe Flash Trigger (V2) Kit" and seeing that they were indeed the ones I was after, I ordered a set.

A few days later, I got an email from the seller saying they had run out of stock the day I ordered and there would be about a half a month wait before they got more back in stock. I thought to myself, that's fine, I could do without the distraction from my assignments anyway but it will give me something to look forward to.

So the estimated date for the next shipment of the triggers to the seller came and went and I had heard nothing. Again, I thought that it would be fine and they would probably just post them to me when they get them in. A couple of days later, I got another message from them saying that the stock had arrived and my package was on its way.

Skip forward a few days to yesterday. I come home from uni, to find a package sitting on my desk. I opened it up to find a blank white cardboard box and inside, my new wireless triggers. In my excitement, I took them out of the box, put the battery in the receiver and mounted my 430EX to them. Hit the test button, pop went the flash. That is where things went pear shaped. The flash kept popping by itself, a lot. Oh crap I thought. I remembered reading about this exact problem with the V1 version of the triggers but it was supposed to be fixed with the subsequent V2 and V2s versions. I jumped back on the items ebay page to see in rather small print "not compatible with canon 430EX". Hmm.. I thought, how could I be so stupid to not see that. But I still had a niggling thought in the back of my head that I was certain that issue was fixed with the V2 triggers.

So I spent the night researching and the more I looked, the more I doubted that my triggers were the ones I ordered. I did manage to work out a deal for a friend with V2 triggers to come around to test them. Our theory was that if mine were really what they said they were, my trigger would set off his receiver when set to the same channel (V1 triggers used a different frequency to the V2(s) ones). Sure enough, nothing happened when we tried it. Also, my flash did not pop by itself once on his receiver. My receiver also refused to fire his Vivitar 285HV, which was another known problem of the V1 triggers.

So here I am, with triggers that were not what they were advertised as and I am still waiting to hear back from the seller (2 messages sent know). I think I will get a set of the 16 channel ones and do what this fellow on POTN has once this is sorted out. But to sum it all up, really not happy!