Yongnuo YN600EX-RT — Cheap but Cute

Canon Speedlite flash­es are the most desired by most pho­tog­ra­phers and can right­ly be con­sid­ered one of the best on the mar­ket. But they have such a prop­er­ty: high cost. This prop­er­ty makes it dif­fi­cult to buy sev­er­al flash­es at once to cre­ate a com­plete light­ing sys­tem. Today I will tell you about the Yongn­uo YN600EX-RT, an almost com­plete copy of the amaz­ing Canon 600EX-RT. The orig­i­nal may be a lit­tle bet­ter than the copy, but the near­ly dou­ble price dif­fer­ence makes up for it. Does it make sense to invest in a sys­tem of such out­breaks or is it a use­less under­tak­ing?

Design and build qual­i­ty

Yongn­uo YN600EX-RT looks very sim­i­lar to its coun­ter­part from Canon. The dif­fer­ence becomes notice­able only if you hold both flash­es in your hands. For exam­ple, some of Canon’s flash but­tons have labels, the SEL/SET but­ton on the Yongn­uo rotates with the set­ting dial, and the Yongn­uo’s dis­play has a more round­ed shape with orange back­light­ing instead of green.

The flash­es also have a design dif­fer­ence: to turn the head of the Yongn­uo YN600EX, you do not need to press a but­ton, unlike the Canon 600EX. The head itself can rotate 360 ​​degrees hor­i­zon­tal­ly and with­in a range of ‑7 to +90 degrees ver­ti­cal­ly.

Build qual­i­ty is high, though not up to par with the orig­i­nal 600EX-RT. But still, progress is notice­able in com­par­i­son with Yongn­uo flash­es of past gen­er­a­tions, like the Yongn­uo YN560-II: over the past few years, the com­pa­ny has done a lot of work in this direc­tion.

The main con­nec­tors are locat­ed on the left side of the flash: PC-port, USB-port, 1/4″ thread for mount­ing to a stand and a con­nec­tor for con­nect­ing an exter­nal bat­tery pack. The entire right side is occu­pied by the bat­tery com­part­ment, and the rear pan­el is equipped with the main con­trols and LCD dis­play.

Per­for­mance

The flash pro­vides exact­ly the same guide num­ber as the Canon 600EX-RT: 60 meters at ISO 100 and 200mm focal length. Auto zoom is adjustable with­in the range of 20–200mm. There is a high-speed fast sync mode HSS and built-in sup­port for mas­ter mode. The most inter­est­ing thing is that, unlike the Pix­el X800C from our last review, the Yongn­uo 600EX-RT can work with orig­i­nal Canon RT sys­tems.

Mount­ed direct­ly on the cam­era, it per­forms well in TTL mode, pro­duc­ing excel­lent results, fast recy­cling times (3 sec­onds at full pow­er) and excel­lent expo­sure. The Yongn­uo 600EX-RT was test­ed on a Canon EOS 60D, with which it was pos­si­ble to adjust the flash set­tings direct­ly from the cam­era menu. By the way, this device is also com­pat­i­ble with Nikon cam­eras: the built-in flash on the Nikon D750 per­fect­ly com­mands the Yongn­uo 600EX-RT, although the pow­er con­trol was not avail­able for con­trol through the cam­era menu.

How­ev­er, the only way to real­ly unlock the poten­tial of this flash is to mount it far from the cam­era and com­bine it with anoth­er flash, the YN-E3-RT trans­mit­ter or sim­i­lar solu­tions from Canon.

Syn­chro­niza­tion occurs almost instant­ly, remote con­trol is very sim­ple and con­ve­nient. Menu nav­i­ga­tion is con­ve­nient. Yes, the menu is copied from the orig­i­nal Canon 600EX-RT, but devel­op­ing your own sys­tem would increase the final cost for the buy­er.

Con­clu­sion

Yongn­uo got a pret­ty decent flash with decent per­for­mance. It can be safe­ly advised to pho­tog­ra­phy lovers who plan to do more advanced and seri­ous shoot­ing. In addi­tion, it is per­fect for pro­fes­sion­als, even those who already have the orig­i­nal Canon 600EX-RT in their kit, because these flash­es are back­wards com­pat­i­ble. Thanks to this, you can safe­ly build a whole light­ing sys­tem with­out sig­nif­i­cant dam­age to your wal­let.

Timur Bub­lik