Sunpak Auto 622 Pro System

There's two big varieties of flash. The first good flashes all ended up using a big reflector and flashbulbs and thus ended up being mounted on the side of the camera. Eventually, good electronic flashes showed up on the market. Either way, the pro flashes used to all mount on the side as a handle and the amateur flashes used to mount on top on the shoe.

This is why older Nikons have weird hotshoes, by the way.

It's ended up that, with flash brackets and better circuitry and faster lenses and faster film and digital sensors, you can do it all with a hotshoe flash most of the time, so handle-mount flashes are disappearing for most markets. So, both Canon and Nikon haven't bothered keeping handle mount flashes fresh in the lineup since the eighties.

Still, if you check out KEH, there are plenty of used handle-mounted flashes out there used. And they do actually fill an interesting spot in the market. My 622 has about the same level of light output as the lowest end studio strobes, just not as fast of a cycle time. It weighs a lot less than a studio strobe. You can even add high voltage batteries to get a fairly good cycle time. It's specced as a 125 watt/second flash, so little less in terms of true watt/seconds than the the Alien Bees B400 has.

Plus, if you look at it, you really have something akin to a flash on a flash bracket, except that all of the handle bits used to position stuff actually do something instead of just being there for a grip.

Sunpak made (they've mostly been discontinued) two major types of handlemount flashes. The 5xx series is just a very powerful flash with a handle and the 6xx series is a flash system where you can swap parts out. I weighed the options, looked at what was available from KEH, and picked the 622. The older 611 models may zap your camera (190v trigger voltage) and the newer 622 Super models are a little more money for a little more power, although all of the attachments seem to be common between the two 622 models... you just have a higher guide number with the Super model.

How do you know it's a system? Well, the 622 has seven heads to chose from -- A standard head, a wide-angle head, a zoom head, a ring head, an infrared head, a diffusion head, and a bare-bulb head. You can put a 4 x C battery pack or a low-voltage NiCad battery or a high-voltage battery pack or an AC adapter. The battery magazine clips on the front, so if you use a high voltage battery or an AC adapter, you aren't carrying around a vestigial battery. I've also found that it's handy to be able to render the whole thing inert after a shoot by popping the battery pack off.

If you get one used, you need to make sure you get all of the parts. There's the flash body, the head, the battery container, the camera platform, and the cable and you want all of those bits or else you will be wondering how the @#$&! the thing is supposed to plug into your camera and why the power switch does nothing.

The camera platform is OK but not stellar, although the way it connects to the flash is quite nice. There's a gap between the handle (which contains a huge capacitor to store the charge) and the battery pack where your hand goes, for a brass-knuckles effect. It's totally big enough for people with huge hands wearing gloves. The problem with the platform is that it feels fine next to a lightweight 35mm camera, but it's totally out of it's league with my RB67. I'm toying with the options of either trying to find the bracket that Sunpak made (not anymore) that was intended for medium format gear or just buying a proper flash bracket and try to get it to fit well with all of my various little bits.

The flash adds maybe three pounds to the weight of the camera. However, because of the way the grip works, I tend to not feel it as much. It's much easier to wield than a G7 with a full-size hotshoe flash, for example.

There's no benefit in having the standard head over the zoom head, other than size and maybe cost. The coverage at medium is the same and the power is the same. The zoom setting at the widest is about equivalent to 28mm, the middle setting is equivalent to about 35mm and the telephoto setting is about equivalent to 135mm. The lever seems to move something internally because it change the length of the flash. The head can be aimed almost anywhere. It rotates almost all the way around and tilts up and down.

I kinda want either the diffusion or bare bulb head. They look like fun. The ring lights are only for macro use, not having enough power to do the current fashionable style of ringlight flash. The infrared head is pretty much the standard head with an IR filter.

The user interface is pretty much the standard Sunpak interface, so it feels very familiar compared to the old 383 super. Everything's clustered on the back of the camera and the controls work about the same way. Unlike the 383 Super, the distance scale lights up, and depending on how you have set the zoom lever, it will light up to indicate what the zoom head is zoomed to. They went through extra lengths to polish the interface, so you can't switch to auto mode unless the power level switch is all the way to full power, unlike the 383 and the distance scale light goes out when you set it for bounce. There is a separate light for "Ready to shoot" and "100% charged" and a light to warn you that you are using a flash attachment that invalidates the guide number calculator on the back. I tend to prefer the Sunpak interface with the sliders over the Vivitar interface with the dial, although you may not.

There is a lot of control over power. Compared to my 383 super, instead of letting you select power in auto mode in 2-stop increments, it lets you select power in one stop increments.. plus it has seven possible apertures instead of just three. So the maximum auto mode is f/2 at ISO 100 on both, but I can stop down more and with better control. In manual mode, it has eight manual power settings, going in full stops from full power down to 1/128th power.

There is a port on the side that you can plug camera-specific control units into.. except that they haven't been updated for any of the modern flash systems, so the Canon module will just do TTL instead of E-TTL and I'm imagining that the other modules are similarly dated. I didn't bother to get any of them because my cameras are all either too old or too new.

The other sync port is an HH style plug, so you can just get an HH to PC adapter plug and trigger it with any normal camera. I checked and mine has voltage low enough to not fry my camera on both examples.

I've been told that the thread on the bottom of the flash is fairly crappy and it'll eventually fall off, whereas the port that the camera platform plugs into looks much more reliable. For off-camera use, one way to work is to use the camera adapter and screw the umbrella bracket into the thread for the camera, which may require that you adjust both the flash head and the umbrella.

I've also found that the handle is just the right size for a Bogen SuperClamp (or your no-name clone) to grip. This preserves umbrella bracket functionality.

So, now, how does it work in practice?

I discovered that the range in power settings is actually quite usable and it's made my flash photography much easier to deal with. With the 383, I'd always end up wanting the power setting between the two widest aperture auto settings... with this I just use the power setting between the two. And I've also discovered that it's much easier to just take it down to 1/32 or 1/64 while shooting bare instead of realizing that it's at 1/16 power and that I need to move the light stand back.

It's huge. It doesn't fit in my camera bag like a little hotshoe flash does, so I have to really mean it if I'm going to bring the flash along. It actually stresses out my hands less than using a 383 super with my G7 because there's more angles to grip it from. It's also far more portable than a studio flash.

Even the fresnel lens face on the front is huge. This means that you get slightly softer light than before because of the larger area of illumination, but it also means that not all flash accessories will still work. It's even worse than the Vivitar 285HV in terms of gel booklets... you pretty much can't use them. I'm shocked at how many black straws I need to steal from coffeehouses to make a grid.

The camera bracket, as I said above, is about at the bottom limit of plastic flimsyness. It doesn't feel great when mated to my RB67 even though it does feel just fine when mated to my G7 or my 35mm camera. On the other hand, because it's got a fairly secure quick-release, I can unlink the camera from the flash and shoot off-camera.

The C batteries made a lot of sense back then, but are now kind of a downside. Most stuff takes AA batteries and it's actually fairly hard to find C and D sized rechargeables and chargers for them. I was using some AA batteries in adapters, except that they don't quite fit right, so I got some C cells instead. The upside of the C cells is that they've got twice as much juice as a AA, so it's fairly hard to actually run out of juice from the fully-charged state before a shoot.

I've come to the conclusion that, despite being a bulky pain in the ass, I really do like this flash far more than the Vivitar 285HV and the LumaPro LP120. I like the extra power, better control, longer battery life, ergonomics, and accessory kits. I've got two of them and I want more.

By the way, there's another advantage that should surprise nobody who knows me well.

If I've got my 622 and my G7 and I walk into a room filled with photographers, none of them will have anything remotely like my setup. After I got the G7, everybody else started getting G7's, G9's, and G10's, so having a G-series is not new. But I've never seen anybody else with a potato masher flash. And it turns out that having a little camera and a huge flash looks really amusing.

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