This Godox V1 Pro-O round camera flash for Olympus and Panasonic cameras comes in a soft pouch with a belt loop on it for out and about carries with minimal kit, such as weddings and so on. With it comes a charger, coloured filters, a small stand and so on. The flash unit locks onto your camera with the standard rotating collar that has a button that you have to press in order to release the collar when you are taking it off again.
The flash head rotates up and down as well as almost all of the way around (330 degrees) so you can point that at the ceiling or a wall to get a soft light and the fill-in flash will give the straight-on light that you expect from a flash mounted on a camera – the flash unit doesn’t use the fill-in flash unless the main flash is not pointing at the subject, ie, tilt or pan. The level of flash from this is controllable on the flash unit’s menu system. You can remove the fill-in flash physically from the flash unit by pressing a little button at the top and then pulling it off. The main flash and fill-in flash use a gas electrical discharge tube which gives a continuous spectrum as you can see in the final photograph – this is taken with a camera so you can see how your camera will respond to the spectrum – so colours will render properly.
The battery is a VB30 lithium ion battery with a capacity of 2.98Ah or nearly 21.5Wh. It is the same physical size and charge capacity as the VB26B battery and is completely interchangeable. However, the VB30 battery has a USB C socket on it so that you can recharge it without having to use a battery charger unit although you can use one of those (the VC26) if you want to. It is worth noting that you can use the battery whilst you have it on charge with the USB C so if you want, you can power this flash with a D-Tap block or similar in order to extend the duration of a shoot.
As with many things, the versatility comes from selecting options from the menus and with this flash unit, you can select whether it runs in TTL mode, manual or multiple. With manual and multiple, you can select the brightness of each flash as a fraction of the whole so you can select 1/1, 1/2, 1/4 and so on, in stops, down to 1/256. In multiple, it fires the flash multiple times at a count from one to one hundred and at a frequency of 1Hz to 100Hz. The flash unit calculates from the frequency and the power of each flash, how many flashes are the maximum and if you have them set to more, as you adjust the other settings, it will cut them down to something that it can manage in terms of brightness and opportunity to recharge. The unit fires at the given frequency for as long as the camera has the shutter open so if your count and duration exceeds that, flashes will not get recorded. Also, if you are testing it by pressing the trigger button on the flash, you need to hold that in for the duration.
If you are using a focal plane shutter, you would normally be limited to an exposure duration in the order of 1/90th or maybe 1/125th of a second – the first shutter curtain has to have cleared the sensor and the second has to have not started off yet. However, you can opt for faster shutter speeds than that because the flash unit will fire a number of times as the gap between the shutter curtains passes the sensor, exposing each slice as it goes. If you have a between the lens shutter, it will expose properly up to as far as I could test it at 1/4,000th second without any dimming – with a between the lens shutter, the shutter speed is essentially a dial for how much ambient light you want in your photograph.
Another feature is that the flash unit can cover the spread of light so that only the area you need to be illuminated is. So, as you zoom in, this unit automatically changes the focal length equivalent of the camera so that the area is fully illuminated. It does this for 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, 70mm, 80mm and 105mm with intermediate focal lengths covered by a wider setting. It also marks on the display the distance range that you can use the flash with a good exposure and this changes as you change the aperture, shutter speed at higher speeds or the ISO/DIN/ASA. You can also change the effective coverage manually so if you wanted to illuminate a small area in a scene, you could narrow this down without losing power to any great extend as opposed to using a modifier which would.
Finally, the flash will communicate with others wirelessly so you can set up one of these flashes as the master (normally the one on the camera or on a cable extension to the camera) and the others as slaves – specifying which group any particular slave flash is on – more than one flash can be in any particular group. The master flash unit can then control how each group of flashes will behave in terms of on/off, Manual/TTL, proportion of a full flash and as you change it on the master, it changes live on the relevant slaves. If there are other similar flashes around that might interfere with your flashes, you can change the channel that you are using and you can find the channels that are not being used by performing a scan from the menu.
This is an excellent, versatile flash unit that has a strong flash with a flash factor of 28 in metres (28 metres at ISO 100 at 50mm).