We were told recently that Canon would be announcing a new flagship Speedliite ahead of CP+ next month, and this price drop may be evidence that the information is true.
This is the lowest price we've ever seen for this Speedlite from an authorized dealer.
Canon Speedlite 600EX II-RT $399 (Reg $579)
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I never liked the idea of that strange AI technology, for I like to provide the necessary intelligence myself... Is AI any good?
Like the idea of reductions on the old one though as it is a great flashgun.
Wedding Photographer North East & Yorkshire Northumberland & Wedding Photographer Cumbria
The round head gives much nicer fall-off and the Lipo battery lasts for ages.
The accessory pack for it is also excellent with its magnets holding the accessories.
I have a bunch of regular speedlites and Godox 360s.
For a wedding last autumn, I bought the basic AI flash refurb, and it was fun to use. I could easily get by without using it. But it also worked good.
One very nice thing was how quiet it operated. Almost silent instead of the rattling clicking and clacking of many speedlites doing bounce flash.
Put in few words, it was quiet, fun and affordable to use.
All of what you've mentioned, plus A BATTERY LEVEL INDICATOR, PLEASE!
It is fantastic, if they moved it into a 600 MkIII I’d get one immediately. It works really well for function type work and is particularly effective if you mix up portrait and landscape orientations, it just deals with that flip automatically.
The 470 EX Ai doesn’t work, well the Ai bit, on the M cameras, which I think is a huge mistake by Canon.
One of the many, many reasons why it's time to retire AA batteries from Speedlites and move onto lithium batteries. How about a flash that takes LP-E6 batteries? Or better still a system like on the Godox where there's a battery-shaped hole that the battery clicks into without needing a battery compartment door (the first thing that always fails on flashes).
For fast moving event style photography, family gatherings, receptions etc etc where I can use a single on camera flash it is my first choice.
OK, after watching a few demonstration videos, yes, I agree, the semi-automatic AI mode that compensates for orientation changes seems a beneficial function (that is, if the orientation change of the camera is in the right direction such that the flash can compensate for it, obviously.) Might be nice.
I rarely use speedlites on camera, for in most of my setups I only put the transmitter on the camera and place the speedlites somewhere in the room. And in those rare cases when I use the flash on camera I don't use slaves, so I wouldn't miss the RT function on the 470EX-AI too much, but I would still be annoyed not to be able to use the 470-AI as an RT-slave. So, yes, this is a serious lack of feature.
By the way, the MR-14EX II came out shortly after the 600 RT and it also didn't include RT, which I also found a very sad omission, because the ringlite would make an excellent RT master (it is only an optical master). At least the current twinlite MT-26-EX-RT has RT built into it, so that makes it possible to use 600-RT as RT-slaves in macro photography, which is great.
I really find it very weird not to put the RT function into every flash. Even a 90EX speedlite would be an excellent RT-master (it is only an optical master).