A CLS system using my older Nikon speed lights and 3rd party budget gear?

desmobob

Senior Member
I remember researching this a while back and thinking I had it figured out, but never went through with purchasing the gear.

My situation: From my F4s film days, I have two SB-24 speedlights and a compact SB-22s speedlight. I later purchased an SB-800 for my D750.

I'm looking for a tool that will allow me to radio control these units (just the two SB-24s and the SB-800, really) allowing for iTTL and CLS features, possibly with one of the speedlights being able to be mounted on the camera-mounted control unit when using a simple two-light set-up without light stands, etc. (I've seen some controllers that have a hot shoe on top.)

Can it be done inexpensively with gear from Godox, Yongnuo or something in that budget range?

Thanks for any help and advice.
 

BF Hammer

Senior Member
I'm waiting on an answer too. But my researching in the past 9 days since acquiring a SB-24, a cheap TTL Vivitar speedlight, and owning a TTL SunPak speedlight I bought for my Coolpix 995 has not given me any answer other than CLS would not be possible. But they can be triggered by many types of devices and used with manual exposure control.
 

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
Essentially, Yes... The Yongnuo YN622N-tx is a transmitter/controller... about $45 on Amazon... It will talk (radio not CLS) with YONGNUO Wireless TTL Flash Trigger YN622N II with High-Speed Sync HSS 1/8000s for Nikon Camera... <-- they're about $85/pair on Amazon...

Or $85 for 1 Trigger and 1 Transmitter...

You would have to mount the Transmitter on the camera, and a trigger on each light that you'd want to control...

Unfortunately, you would NOT be able to use the SB-800 as a "controller"...

An alternative, depending on where you'd use the lights, is a simple Optical Slave for the 2 small lights and the SB-800 on-camera... Of course, the lights would all fire, but you would have to manually configure the slaved lights as the SB-800 would not control them. They would simply fire based on the light pulse/flash from the SB-800 on-camera.

Typically, Controller/Transmitters do not have a hot shoe on top to add a light, unless they are of the combined design whereby the Transmitter is also a Trigger...
 
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BF Hammer

Senior Member
I dug up this article about the differences between TTL, D-TTL, and iTTL and how the CLS fits in to it. The very dumbed-down version is that CLS communicates exposure data from camera to the flash. A SB-24 does not have the programming inside to understand that, which is why it either will only fire full blast or must have a lower flash power set manually. No optical or radio trigger can make the speedlight understand that data, but they can be made to pass the data to a speedlight that does have the smarts (like an SB-800, SB-600...). The older TTL standard just has the camera itself trigger on the speedlight at the main pin, and one of the other pins is the turn-off when the meter in the camera determines there is enough exposure. It is this simple system that is not compatible with DSLR camera bodies.

https://www.scantips.com/lights/ttl.html

On that note, I say it is a bit weird that older TTL cannot be made to work on DSLR because my Coolpix 995 from 2001 did use TTL speedlights in TTL mode with a bracket adapter. It was more like a thyristor setup with an external light sensor on the pop-up flash to estimate the power and I guess with no interchangeable lenses it can be done.
 
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