Inexpensive, Quality Speedlight

Review by Erik Vlietinck

The Cactus RF60X Wireless Flash is a speedlight with a built-in radio transceiver, HSS and stroboscopic capabilities, support for four groups, and delay functionality. It’s compatible with the Cactus V6 II, V6 IIs, and older V6 flash triggers.

The RF60X has a guide number of 56 at ISO 100. Its motor zooms from 24–105 mm, and it has flash durations from 1/1,000–1/45,000 sec; however, it’s unclear whether these are at t.5 or t.1. You can operate it in Local, Master, or Slave mode, and it can also function as an optical slave. It has a 1-W LED AF-Assist light, is powered by four AA-batteries, and weighs 395g. Cactus also has an external power pack, but I used four eneloop pro AA cells.

The flash has a 3.5mm jack port instead of a PC sync port, a micro-USB port for updating firmware, and a very useful tripod 1/4″ mount. A good flash should be able to consistently fire at the same flash duration even when you fire it several times in a row. The RF60X fired 100% consistently at full strength and only varied with 0.26% at half strength. The flash was ready for firing again at full power within two seconds, and output was perfectly even.

The RF60X has a cooling feature that doesn’t abruptly turn off the flash when it risks overheating. Instead, it will decrease the recycle time to let the flash cool down.

The Cactus RF60X Wireless Flash can be part of or control one of four groups, and you can control both power level and zoom factor remotely. One unique feature is that you can set your groups to alias names that make sense to you. For example, you can set Group A to “Hair” and Group B to the alias “Fill” to make it easier to remember what each flash does. ■