Yongnuo YN560-TX — Precise Control

Yongn­uo’s prod­ucts are renowned for their use­ful­ness far out­weigh­ing their cost. One of the most famous of these prod­ucts is the Yongn­uo YN560-TX trans­mit­ter, which is designed to accom­pa­ny flash­es such as the YN560-III or YN560-IV. Let’s take a look at it togeth­er and try to decide whether to get one, and if so, why.

Since the YN560-TX is designed to work with the third and fourth gen­er­a­tions of the YN560 fam­i­ly of flash units, there are clear design sim­i­lar­i­ties between the units. The body of the YN560-TX is per­fect­ly assem­bled: noth­ing creaks, does not stag­ger, and there is no doubt about reli­a­bil­i­ty.

The trans­mit­ter is attached to the cam­era using a “hot shoe”, and it will be installed ver­ti­cal­ly, so it will be con­ve­nient to con­trol the device. How­ev­er, when shoot­ing from a tri­pod set in the low­er posi­tion, it will be incon­ve­nient to con­trol the YN560-TX: there is no hinge here, which means that it will be impos­si­ble to tilt the body.

Before you can start using the Yongn­uo YN560-TX, it will need to be “paired” with a flash. This is a very small but impor­tant nuance, since the process is sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent from the usu­al group­ing of flash­es into groups. This may seem unusu­al to some, but there is a very sig­nif­i­cant advan­tage here: when shoot­ing in crowd­ed places with pho­tog­ra­phers with sim­i­lar equip­ment, you will not inter­fere with them, and they will not dis­turb you. More­over, even if you use the same chan­nels as oth­ers, you will still not be able to con­trol oth­er peo­ple’s flash­es, since you did not estab­lish a con­nec­tion between them and your trans­mit­ter.

So, in order to con­nect the YN560-TX with a flash, you need to press and hold two but­tons at the same time: ZOOM / CH and Hz / FN. At the same time, “ACT” will light up on the trans­mit­ter dis­play, and the flash dis­play should be acti­vat­ed, sig­nal­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of con­nect­ing. Then you just have to press the “OK” but­ton on the flash and the con­nec­tion will be com­plet­ed.

The inter­face of the trans­mit­ter is easy to use, unlike sim­i­lar solu­tions from Canon or Nikon, which are usu­al­ly over­loaded with numer­ous hid­den menus and sub­menus. Yongn­uo YN560-TX sup­ports 6 groups of flash­es, which are named as A, B, C, D, E, and F. At the same time, the groups them­selves in the menu are dis­played as two sub­groups: A, B, C and D, E, F. In order to switch between sub­groups, just press and hold the “Group” but­ton, and in order to con­trol each group indi­vid­u­al­ly, you just need to press and hold the “Group” once.

The rest of the con­trols will look like you have the same YN560-III or YN560-IV in your hands: you can adjust the flash out­put in full-stop or 1/3‑stop steps, con­trol the flash zoom and select the mode. At the same time, there will be prac­ti­cal­ly no delay in flash con­trol — every­thing hap­pens instant­ly. More­over, I have nev­er encoun­tered a sit­u­a­tion where the flash did not receive a com­mand from this trans­mit­ter.

Con­clu­sion

Ulti­mate­ly, the com­bi­na­tion of this trans­mit­ter and a man­u­al flash will give you the abil­i­ty to fine-tune man­u­al light­ing, which is unlike­ly to be repeat­ed when shoot­ing in auto­mat­ic mode. Giv­en the price of the Yongn­uo YN560-TX and, for exam­ple, the YN560-III, it’s hard to find a cheap­er com­bi­na­tion with even an approx­i­mate lev­el of per­for­mance and fea­ture set — an excel­lent option for bud­get pho­tog­ra­phy.

Timur Bub­lik