The only significant real-world advantage to me of a hotshoe-mounted flash is that...well...you can mount it to your hotshoe.
As soon as you take that flash off the hotshoe, it loses its single most important advantage and takes on almost all the disadvantages of studio lights. And you're still saddled with all the very significant disadvantages of a hotshoe flash -- its very wimpy power, its astronomical cost, the hell of using it with any modifier other than a small and cheesy umbrella, and so on.
For me, a hotshoe flash is only for situations where it's going to stay mounted to the camera, and even then it's really just for bounce flash. If I was going to use it straight on, I might as well whip out the iPhone -- the end result will be just as ugly.
If I'm going to go to the bother of setting up stands and softboxes and what-not, I'm damned well not going to put up with the nonsense of an overpriced, underpowered toy at the heart of all that effort. An Einstein and a Vagabond, compared with the light stand and the softbox / parabolic reflector / whatever, isn't adding significantly more to the bulk and weight at that point. And the Cyber Commander is such an awesome remote control system that I really couldn't care about messing with on-camera menus.
So, that's my advice. Get the hotshoe flash if you'll actually use it primarily in the camera's hotshoe, and get real strobes for the stuff that won't be mounted to a hotshoe.
Right tool for the job and all that. A sledgehammer and a claw hammer are both hammers and, I suppose, at some vague level, theoretically interchangeable. But you'd be nuts to try to bust up a concrete pad with a claw hammer and even more insane to try to frame a house with a sledge.
Cheers,
b&
Cheers,
b&
