How to Buy a Camera Flash

Senior updates writer Arriana Vasquez has been doing both professional and hobbyist photography for over 10 years and has worked as a camera specialist at several camera stores in New York City. Besides writing for Wirecutter, she is a photographer at a product studio, where she shoots everything from antique charms to zebra-print leggings. She has also contributed to Wirecutter’s guides to tripods, tripods for smartphones, and instant cameras.

This article was edited by Phil Ryan, who has been an editor and senior staff writer at Wirecutter since 2017. Prior to his time at Wirecutter, he was a senior technical editor for Popular Photography magazine, where he ran the testing lab and tested all types of photo gear. Before that he was a senior editor for CNET, specializing in photo and video equipment. He has tested lights ranging from small flashlights and on-camera flashes to light panels, large studio strobes, and tungsten and HMI hot lights.

A camera flash, or speedlight, as it’s more often called, gives you more control over the scene you’re trying to shoot. If you’ve ever been let down by the look of a photo because the light wasn’t great that day, a flash can help.

With a flash or two, you can light almost any subject or scene. Even when you’re shooting outside, using a flash can still come in handy for filling in shadows or helping to separate the subject from the background. Regardless, working with speedlights is a great skill to have in your photography toolkit, even if you prefer to shoot using only natural light.

To understand the real-world differences between flashes from a variety of brands, we tested speedlights from Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, and Sony, as well as two from Godox: one with a round flash head (Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, Olympus/Panasonic, Sony) and one with a rectangular head (Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, Olympus/Panasonic, Sony). Though you can find various third-party flash manufacturers, we included only Godox here because it has a solid warranty program, compatibility with a wide range of camera brands, and good standing with the Better Business Bureau, while none of the other third-party brands we looked into could claim the same.

When you’re buying anything, not just a camera flash, you should look for a high-quality warranty program, a reliable company, and dependable customer service. The big camera makers, such as Canon, Nikon, and Sony, cover all those bases.

For camera flashes in particular, we found a few essential features:

• Manual mode: “The manual function is most often used by professional photographers” because it gives you precise control over the speedlight, said Alex Yuan of the School of Visual Arts. We think that it’s a good thing for anyone to have, though.
• A variety of zoom settings: The zoom setting controls the spread of light that the flash emits so that it matches the focal length of the lens. That is, it either concentrates the light into a narrower beam for longer focal lengths or disperses the light to cover a wider area for shorter focal lengths.
• A large screen with plenty of buttons: We favor a speedlight with a screen larger than 2 inches wide and more than two or three buttons. A flash with more buttons is likely to offer dedicated buttons for the most used and needed settings for ease of access, and navigating the settings menus of such a flash is faster. This feature is especially important for people who have dexterity issues or have trouble seeing tiny fonts.

1. Does it work with your camera?

Doing a simple search for “camera flash” yields hundreds of results, and while nearly all of them would physically fit in the hot shoe of your camera (the small metal bracket on top), you need one that can exchange information with your particular brand of camera.

“The communication between the speedlight and the camera bodies is very important,” said Alex Yuan. A flash that is specifically made for your camera allows you to use a feature called TTL (video), which stands for “through the lens.” (You may also run across references to ETTL, or “evaluative through the lens.”) In this mode, the camera’s metering system judges the light coming through the lens to make sure you’re using the right amount of flash for the picture you’re taking.

TTL is helpful when you’re just getting started because it does a lot of the “thinking” for you. “We can consider it kind of an auto function,” said Yuan. You set the camera’s shutter speed and/or aperture according to how you want it, and the camera increases or decreases the flash output accordingly to ensure that the picture still comes out well lit.

2. Can you tilt and swivel the flash head?

Ideally, you should get a flash that can tilt all the way to a 90-degree angle from the body of the flash, as well as rotate around to face different angles. This feature allows for more options when you’re shooting, as you can either face the flash directly at your subject (direct flash) or aim the unit away—to the ceiling, for example—to add fill light (indirect flash).

Though you might find yourself in the occasional scenario where you need to use direct flash, most of the time you’ll probably use indirect flash. When you’re using indirect flash and bouncing the light off a nearby surface such as a wall, you create a different lighting effect. “Usually it’s much softer than the direct flash, so if the flash head … cannot rotate, you’re losing that functionality, which is quite important,” said Yuan.

3. How much power do you need?

Flash units run on either AA batteries (single-use lithium or rechargeable) or a proprietary rechargeable battery pack; we recommend choosing a flash with a rechargeable battery pack. “The advantage of [rechargeable] batteries is that they usually last longer per charge versus the AA batteries and have a faster recycle [time],” Yuan told me. If you opt for a speedlight that takes AAs, we recommend getting one that uses four instead of two, so you’re not running through batteries so quickly.

To test the power and accuracy of the speedlights we tried, we stood in a pitch-black room and triggered each flash directly at a light meter that we placed at a distance of 1 meter. We set the light meter to match the power setting of the speedlight and then took note of what the meter said the aperture should be. At max power, every flash unit except the Godox V860III resulted in an aperture somewhere in the vicinity of f/22; the V860III’s max power resulted in an aperture of f/32, which indicated that it put out more light at its top power setting than the other units did.

In other words, if you were to stand in a totally dark room and attempt to photograph something from a distance of 1 meter using one of the speedlights we tested, with your ISO and shutter speed at the same settings as ours, you would set your aperture to f/22 in order to get a well-lit subject.

Of the speedlights we tested by Godox, two used proprietary rechargeable batteries. We noticed that their recycle times were fractionally faster, even in the case of the more-powerful V860III.

The other thing we considered was how well each camera flash managed to cut the light from full to half power, then one-fourth, then one-eighth, all the way to the lowest setting that each flash could muster (most go to 1/128, some extend down to 1/256, and Fujifilm’s flash went down only to 1/64). This matters because an accurate flash enables you to control your lighting intensity precisely, and as a result you can consistently capture shots exactly as you envision them.

In our tests, AA-powered speedlights from Canon, Fuji, and Nikon performed consistently throughout the range of power settings. Godox’s models had “more variance by a tenth of a stop or so between shots at the same output setting as the brand-name units,” said Wirecutter senior staff writer Phil Ryan, who helped me run the test. That’s still acceptable, and it’s easily dealt with in post-production.

Ultimately we found that most camera flash units put out plenty of light, and that the power output from most speedlights (those that take four AA batteries) is more than enough for most situations. As we said, though, rechargeable power packs last longer per charge and recycle a little faster, and you deal with a single pack rather than four batteries, each of which can get lost.

4. Don’t worry about the guide number

One way to talk about how much power a camera flash can put out is with a guide number, which is a technical term that quantifies the flash’s ability to light a subject at a specific distance and aperture setting. Manufacturers often refer to guide numbers, but they can be hard to interpret and sometimes get distorted.

In our tests, we found that every flash put out more than enough light for just about any situation, so we’ve concluded that a more practical way to decide which flash to buy is to consider other factors, such as the batteries it takes or the range of motion you can get from the flash head.

Wireless control

Wireless control allows you to place the speedlight away from your camera, creating off-camera lighting setups. Wireless flash control comes in two forms:

• Infrared: This technology works by emitting a beam of infrared light that is picked up by a receiver built into a flash. It is the less expensive of the two approaches and is often built into midlevel flash units such as the models we suggest above. But it isn’t as versatile as radio because it requires the receiver to be in a location where the infrared signal reaches it.
• Radio: Radio signals can pass through walls and other objects, which gives you more freedom in where you place the flashes you want to control. For example, if you’re doing a portrait of a person in a doorway, you can put one flash behind them and another to the side (on the other side of a wall) to light them from behind, a common technique to create a glow around the subject’s hair. You pay more for radio flash control—exactly how much more varies from one manufacturer to the next—so consider whether the benefits are worth it to you before shelling out the cash.

Both types of flash control require either a flash mounted on your camera that can control the other flashes or a remote controller that tells the off-camera flashes what to do. The remote is another expense that you should keep in mind if you want wireless control.

Modeling light

With a modeling light (sometimes called an LED video light), you can visualize where and how the light is hitting your subject before taking the photo.“It’s not the real flash itself, just kind of a continuous light bulb built in,” said Yuan. Using it can help you take fewer photos and therefore streamline post-production, but the trade-off is that it will eat through your batteries faster.

Modeling lights are a relatively new feature, so availability and price vary among brands. For example, the $230 Godox V1 (Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, Olympus/Panasonic, Sony) and $210 Godox V860III (Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, Olympus/Panasonic, Sony), as well as the $330 Nikon SB-700, include modeling lights. On the other hand, the Fujifilm EF-60 and the Sony HVL-F45RM offer modeling lights for $400, and the cheapest speedlight you can get from Canon with a modeling light is the Canon 600EX, which costs around $500. If you really want this feature, but the speedlights available from your camera brand are more than $300, consider a model from a third party, such as Godox.

If you include all of the above essential features, you end up spending around $250 for a third-party designed flash or $350 for a flash from your camera’s manufacturer. Anything more than that, and you’re likely paying for features you don’t need; anything less, and you’ll probably outgrow the camera flash too quickly.

This article was edited by Phil Ryan and Erica Ogg.