I received my RadioPopper PX brackets for my SBs last night.  My first impression is that they are very good.  They have an excellent build quality.  This doesn’t appear to be cheap plastic – it’s actually pretty thick plastic.  They’re heavier than the bracket that came with my SBs from Nikon.  The ¼-20 fitting on the bottom of the shoe is solid.  As with anything there are pros and cons:  So here’s my review in that style.

Pros:

• Good build quality for both the trigger bracket and the receiver bracket.  These things feel solid.
• The fit is very tight.  In fact, one complaint I had about the PX system has been solved by the receiver bracket – the battery cover is held in place by the bracket itself.
• They have a built in foam core on the back of the mount to control light leakage.  That eliminates any sort of requirement to stick anything to the receiver itself.
• Currently they’re half price ($9.95) for the receiver mounting brackets and they’re worth that.
• The trigger bracket for the pop-up flash is very solid.  It’s actually better than I thought it would be when I saw the picture.
• One bracket fits all SBs.  They are adjustable so you just slip the receiver mount into the proper slot for whichever SB you have.  I have a SB800 and a SB600.  They use different slots so I assume the SB900 uses yet another slot.

Cons:

• There were no instructions in the box.  Because they are adjustable, I didn’t know which slot to use and that took me some trial and error to get it right.  I also didn’t know I could just remove the old foam light guide from the receiver.  It fits much better when it is removed.  All of this should have been covered in the instructions.
• Currently they’re half price ($9.95) for the receiver mounting brackets.  The regular price for the brackets is $19.95.  That seems pretty steep to me.  The Nikon pop-up bracket is not on sale and is the full price of $19.95.  Ouch… but still cheaper than a SU800 I suppose.
• I’m a little concerned about the friction mount of the two bracket parts.  Only time will tell if they’ll get loose.  I think they’ll be okay because the flash itself seems to hold it all together.  If they get loose I’ll complain – I promise.
• No access to the external power ports.  This is a biggie for the wedding crowd who go through lots of batteries.  It won’t kill me but I think this is going to aggravate some of the bigger Popper customers.  Especially since they identified it as a problem when the prototypes came out.  And I don’t see how I use the fifth battery with the SB800.  I’ll have to ask them about that.

Velcro was okay as a solution for mounting the PX systems but these brackets are far superior.  Really, they just don’t compare to Velcro in pretty much every respect.  I believe they should be standard equipment with each and every PX receiver sold if for no other reason than they make the system seem complete.  I will also say that as good as they seem to be, $19.95 is a pretty high price for something that we were told would be cheap.  Hey, I could see charging a premium for lost replacements or if I should decide to jump the Nikon ship and buy up a bunch of Canon gear and need different brackets.

I like to use my RadioPoppers PX via the commander in Manual mode not TTL.  Maybe I’m weird.  This gives me all Strobist control I want but I don’t have to keep jumping around from flash to flash adjusting power some times from hundreds of feet away. When they RadioPopper guys told me I’d be able to control three groups of Alien Bees from the PX system I was sold on the idea.  The bracket is just icing on the cake.

Now let’s see what they bring us Friday, August 14^th with JrX system.