Yongnuo RF-602 Wireless Flash Trigger Review

Yongnuo RF-602 transmitter is nice and small in design. It has couple of minor disadvantages, takes CR-2 style battery which is not quite as easily obtained as AA or AAA style battery. The strange thing is when you put it on camera, it doesn't lock down properly on the hot shoe. It just slides in sand stays there by friction and feels pretty tight but I can see it can be easily be bumped out if it gets a slight knock from the front. Besides that, its pretty good.

The build quality seems quite strong compared to lot of low budget Chinese triggers that I have tried previously. When you connect the flash to the receiver, you run into one other little quirk. When you plug it in,it seems all great, but when you have a canon flash like 430, you can't get to the on/off switch on the trigger. You'll need car key or something like to reach it. But other than that, its a good value for the money.

I took few close up shots with 430-EX mounted on the Yongnuo RF- 602 wireless trigger. I set up the time on shutter for the following:

This meant that I couldn't go up to 320 but only go to 250 which is not surprising. If I were shooting with a pocket wizard, I could go up to 320 or even up 400, but I would’ve spent 10 times as much money for the transmitter / receiver pair for the pocket wizard, compared to what RF-602 would have cost.

I tried taking few real fast shots and check if I get any misfires. Took about 15 photos within 10 seconds. Amazingly I didn't get any misfire in the whole series. That was more consistent than the ones from pocket wizard system. When I used them I used to have multiple misfires. That could be due to the radio noise from the canon flash which may operate in the same spectrum. So if you are a Canon shooter, yet this may be another advantage to have the Yongnuo RF-602 Wireless Flash Trigger.

I had Canon 430-EX flash mounted to the Yongnuo RF-602. I was using the 430-EX because its the most radio noisy flash that I have. I just wanted to give the hardest test to RF-602 that I could. So parked it and walked as far as I could get ( approximately 200 feet) and tried taking the photos and see if the flash triggered.

Shutter speed set to 200 and as I hoped, that was no issue at all. From these testing I was able to to concluded that it's been a successful test. It fired at 200, 250 of the second. Tried to go to 400, but failed which is normal.

As I mentioned earlier, it's a good value for money if you are thinking of buying a wireless trigger for your flash. I wasn't particularly nice to Yongnuo in my precious experiences but may be Yongnuo have stepped up the game and this could be an alarm bell for the other big players in the market.