This review is for the K&F Concept® KF-882 Master Flash Speedlite for Canon tested with a Canon 6DI’ve been using manual flashguns for a few years now and find them to be an amazingly inexpensive way to obtain easily portable, relatively powerful, light. I found them especially useful when I was shooting pet portraits at dog shows – see attached image for the kind of result you can achieve with just three flashguns like the KF-882 and a radio trigger. Anyway, when I was offered the chance to try this flashgun out I had to say yes.The flashes I use normally have a Guide Number (GN) of 56 and go down to 1/64th power. The big difference between mine and the hugely more expensive Canon, Nikon, Metz… is that they have no eTTL. In other words they don’t talk to the camera and you can’t control the exposure, or light output from the camera.This KF-882 claims to be just as powerful (GN56), but it has eTTL functionality too.First things first. This is a hefty beast, quite bulky, and weighing in at just over 18oz. This flashgun, just like my others, runs from 4xAA batteries. I’ve started using NiMh recghargeables just to keep the battery cost, and the waste, down. The battery cover flips up and remains attached to the body. The on/off button is clearly marked and requires holding down for a second or two in order to turn the flashgun on. The flash fits into the camera’s hot shoe easily and there is the usual locking wheel to keep it in place.On first use, I compared it with one of my other flashes. I found the KF-882s zoom function a little fiddly to use. You need to press the zoom button so that the zoom setting flashes (and then one of the unlabeled (up/down/left/right) buttons to change the zoom value. There are ten settings in the range 18mm to 180mm. On the widest setting there was obvious vignetting in the corner of the image – lens set to same value. My comparison flash illuminated the room evenly. However, leaving the lens set to 18mm but with the K&F flash zoom on 180mm a useful spotlight effect was created. I can see this being a quite useful, though probably unintentional, feature. Pulling out the diffuser, but leaving everything else the same, completely removed the vignetting and gave even illumination – so no real problem there. The little white reflector that is stored with the diffuser, refused to emerge after it had been out twice. I rarely use this feature on a flash gun, though it is nice not to have to carry around a scrap of white card and a rubber band, so I don’t see it’s loss as a major problem unless you make use of this accessory a lot. That said, I think the mechanism for holding it in place needs re-thinking because there is clearly poor design/choice of materials here.A first for me with this flashgun was the inclusion of a ‘Stofen-style’ diffuser to fit over the head of the flash. I think this, in some way, makes up for the faulty reflector card.It is has three main modes: E-TTL (camera tells flash to stop when it has pushed out enough light), M (Manual), and Multi (strobe effect).The E-TTL function works better than the one on my Metz 58 AF-1 digital, and there is an easy one button press to reduce, or increase flash power in steps of one third of a stop (EV) so making it very easy to adjust exposure without having to delve into the camera’s flash control menus.In Manual mode you get to choose the output power of the flash directly with anything from full power to 1/128th power in one stop steps. You also have two optical slave settings S1 and S2. Choose one of these and the flash will fire remotely – triggered by the light of another flash going off. I use this mode a lot with my manual flashguns and it means I only need to have one flash on camera, or no flashes on camera with one of them fired by a radio trigger, so I only need one radio receiver.In Multi mode the strobe frequency can be set as a Hz value. The range goes from 1 – 20Hz in steps of 1; from 20 – 50Hz in steps of 5Hz; from 50 – 190Hz in steps of 10Hz; and for some unknown reason there is one last jump from 190 – 199Hz. You also need to set the number of flashes. The range for this is 1 – 40 in single steps. The flash power in multi mode is set to 1/128th of full power and there is no facility to change this.With any mode there is the choice of wireless. With this you can set this flash to master or slave and group flash units in up to four groups. I would have needed several of these K&F flash units to test this feature out and I only have the one, so I can offer no comments on this aspect. But the idea is that you can control the output of flashguns assigned to each group from the master unit. This is great when you are using several guns and you need to adjust one of them because it means it can all be done from the camera position.When I first turned this on there was an annoyingly loud beep every time the flash fired. I didn’t have the instruction book to hand so I just stabbed buttons at random until the little music icon, and the beep, eventually disappeared. However, it seems to have gone forever and I have no idea what I did that removed it. The instruction booklet tells me that a long press on the fn button will turn it on and off, but all it seems to do is bring up function menu. No great loss as far as I can see.I like this flashgun. It is powerful enough for most things you’d want a flash for. It has almost everything a gun costing over five times the price has and works pretty well. My only niggles are the jammed reflector card, and the seeming randomness of the menus – there’s nothing intuitive about them and you definitely need to read the manual to get the most out of this unit. For the price, I think all of that is tolerable, though maybe unacceptable on the Canon 600EX-RT which is only a little more sophisticated than this and over 5 times as expesive. But I use portable flash exclusively off-camera, and frequently on stands, fired by a radio trigger, so for me it does everything I need it to which is fire by optical slave and allow me to adjust the power output easily – all the rest is a bonus. I think this is great value for money.This K&F flashgun was supplied to me for review purposes.