RedOrbit reviews: Nova Off-Camera Wireless Flash

Mark Lee Rollins for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Modern smart phone cameras have come a long way. Back in 2000, Sharp was the OEM for a camera phone with the then-impressive resolution of 0.11 megapixels. Compare this to current phones’ camera resolution of 8 megapixels or more, with image stabilization and advanced image processing, and there is a very real quality difference. One thing that has lagged behind, however, is the phone camera’s flash performance.

That not to say engineers haven’t tried, what with things like multiple flashes that can compensate for sunlight, incandescent, and fluorescent. The problem is often simply one of available real estate. Even the smallest point and shoot digital cameras still have separation between lens and flash of 5 or 6 cm or more.

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This seemingly insignificant distance is very important, for several reasons. The first is that bane of flash photos everywhere – red-eye. This happens when the lens and flash are close enough together, that the flash’s reflection off the retina shows in the photo. If the flash were further off-axis from the lens, like in many interchangeable lens pro-sumer digital cameras, there’s usually no red-eye.

The second thing is by having a larger, more easily positioned flash, you can get rid of things like harsh shadows or odd reflections that happen from the built-in phone flash. You can even get fancy and make a reflector on a piece of white paper and use a “bounce flash.”

The Nova flash connects to any Bluetooth-4 equipped phone. There is a native app for iOS devices, and a third-party app for Android. Flash is very small and quite pocketable, about business card sized. Although I think to say it “fits in a wallet” might be a bit of a stretch as it is as thick as 15 business cards (or 6 redOrbit business cards, inside joke). The flash contains an array of 40 LEDs, of two different color intensities.

When the flash is connected to your phone, a small blue LED shows through the translucent plastic.

The app from Nova gives you all sorts of controls over the flash, the color balance, brightness, etc.

Other apps can support the Nova flash (hello Camera +), but as of this writing only the 645 Pro III does; it even allows two Nova flashes to be used at once.

The Nova is reportedly good for up to 150 flashes between charges (we did not test that but have gotten dozens of shots in the past with no issues. As you can see from the pictures it does make a difference, both with the flash itself, and even which app to use. The pictures below tell the story visually, L to R: flash photo with iPhone 6+ native app and built in flash (note harsh shadows); Nova flash with Nova app; Nova flash with 645 app.

If you had bought the flash via the Kickstarter campaign, you got a nice little case to carry it in – one suggestion of the folks at Nova is they really should sell that case as an accessory.

SUMMARY

How we acquired: Item was purchased. Tested with an iPhone 6+.

Rating system: At redOrbit, we’ve decided to use 1 and 0 (you know–the binary system?) instead of the words “pros” and “cons.” 1 equals pros, 0 equals cons. We basically way-overthink everything.

1- Enhancements to flash photos is really worth the money.

0 – A bit thick to truly be “wallet sized,” should sell case as accessory.

Guide Number = 24 (meters, estimated)

Order the Nova Off-Camera Wireless Flash for iPhone here.

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Source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1113346329/redorbit-reviews-nova-off-camera-wireless-flash-030415/