Spekular Light Blaster Universal Studio Adapter | Optical Snoot Strobe-Based Projection System for Photography Lighting with Gobos and Transparencies

I run Canon 600 EX RTs and the opening for the speedlight with the strap could have been designed better. It's a little cumbersome trying to get that speedlight in there, however once it's in, it isn't coming out. I think it's over priced and should be around $69 instead. But, it works great and I love it once it's deployed and in use. NOTE: I recommend to anyone wanting to maximize its capabilities for projection to use a 50mm 1.2 lens. If you use anything tighter than a 1.8 you will get slight vignetting on the projection, and if you're using the windows gobos, you will see the shadowing. Good product; changed everything for me.

This is essentially a slide projector without a lens or a light. Do you supply those. In other words it is a flash snoot with a mounting ring on the end for a canon lens and his slot in the top to put a transparency in. There’s nothing wrong with this and you can get some really amazing effects. But you’re paying $100 for essentially a plastic shell with a Velcro strap and a very thin metal ring on the end.I expected the build quality to be a little more solid but it it’s just a plastic shell iand the kind of plastic that feels a little brittle. And while I’m the lens mount works just fine, it’s not a machine pieces of stamped metal ring and those just don’t cost very much to make. A lot of this device hinges on little plastic tabs which in my experience tend to break too easily.You could actually make one of these things with some craft foam and a PVC tube and it would cost you very little. You could even buy an actual machine lens mounting ring and secure it to the end of the PVC tube. Yes it would be a significant project. You could make a temporary version just using foam and some Velcro straps or silicone bands.What I’m getting at is $100 for this thing seems very excessive. It feels like something that’s more like $50. NF photographer is going to have most of these pieces are required to make their own already. We have Snoots and Goboes and attachments for flashes and occasionally mounting rings or converters.It definitely does what it supposed to do and it does have a nice tripod socket on the bottom, which you would probably want to use instead of the light mount if you’re hanging expensive lens off the end of this. Since this is a strobe you would probably want to shine a flashlight in the end to get the focusing right on your variable lens before you went ahead and secured the strobe into the other end.There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this unit. But there’s nothing extraordinary about it and it seems far too expensive for what it is. I am not insinuating that it is cheaply made I’m just stating that the things it’s made of are not expensive. Now the lens ring is mounted by for a very tiny Phillips head screws and the plastic that the screws sink into is made a bit thicker than the rest of the plastic housing. But it doesn’t change the fact that your lens is being held onto the mounting point by four screws that are essentially laptop case screws. I would not use a very heavy lens nor a very long one as the cantilever forces increase exponentially as the weight gets farther away from the fulcrum point.If this were $50 I would be giving it at least four stars and possibly five. It does come with a single slide in the slide holder that’s a series of tiny ones and zeros. It’s not a binary code they are simply alternating but I thought it was a cute little joke.

The Spekular Light Blaster Opitical Snoot is a cool idea, but its seriously overpriced for what you get.So what do you get? You get a plastic snoot, one slide, and a case to store it.As for the snoot itself, it has no lighting element, and no lens. Its nothing more than a vehicle for attaching a speedlight in front of a slide onto a Canon EF-S or EF mount lens.So in order to use the snoot, you need to supply the lens, and the speedlight, and additional slides.For $99 at the time of writing, its not bringing a whole lot to the table.And while I like the included slide, projecting binary onto my images is only useful for a handful of circumstances so I'll need to fork over some dough for additional slides.I did some test shots using the snoot with my EF-S 10-18mm lens and they were okay. So its fun to work with and you can definitely get creative with it.But as cool as it is, its not really worth it unless you already have a large library of slides you can use with it. Otherwise it requires a substantial upfront investment for the slides.I found using the strobe based snoot to be more difficult than a projection snoot with a continuous light source. Its challenging to get your scene dialed in with this setup. This wouldn't my go-to setup as a result, even if I did have a massive slide catalog.

This is a great product, but too expensive in my opinion. Right out of the box, the product feels cheap but the most disappointing thing in my opinion is that it only includes a useless slide (gobo) with 0's and 1's. For the price tag of this product it would have been nice to have included a kit of slides (gobos) ), maybe 3-5 as a starter kit. You also have to use your own lenses, which I don't mind, but again for the price tag, they could have included the slides or an affordable wide lens to go with it.