explorer-xt-profile

I’m calling this a “First Look” review because I’ve only gotten one opportunity to really work with this pack, but since I did use it out in the field (I did an on-location shoot for a book project), I wanted to give you my first impressions.

The Problem
If you wanted to take studio lightning on location, you could do it but there two problems:

1. You had to buy special strobe heads that were designed to work with on-location battery packs

2. Good quality location kits are VERY expensive (you were lucky to get a decent single head and a battery pack for around $1,200).

The Dream
Use your own existing regular studio strobes and take them on location. Unfortunately, monoblocks (also called monolights) are strobes that are designed to be plugged right into the wall like any other appliance, so they don’t have a way to plug into a battery pack, so you can’t take your regular studio gear on location, unless there’s a power plug right nearby. The dream is to have your regular gear, anywhere you want it—out on a boat, at the beach, on an island, in the middle of an airplane hanger, on the roof of a hotel, etc.—places where wall plugs aren’t usually found.

The Solution
The solution we found comes from Innvatronix in the Explorer XT Battery Pack, which lets you plug in most regular monolight studio lights right into the pack. That saves you from having to buy special strobe heads to work with your battery packs. In fact, the reason we chose Invatronix was that we read that they work with Elinchrom strobes, which is all we use.

The Test
So we took one of our regular Elincrhom BXRI 500 monolights out to a nearby beach, and we put the Explorer XT on a rock nearby (we didn’t want to actually set it in the sand, though you probably could). We plugged the BXRI in (it has standard 110v sockets) and it worked first time (it supports up to two strobes). It worked great throughout the entire shoot, and recycled very fast. We were relieved it worked as well as promised.

What it Needs Next
Although it worked great in our somewhat limited test (we only did one shoot, and only used one studio strobe), there are two things it really needs to be a success:

  1. It really looks awful. It’s as if no thought whatsoever was given to how the unit itself looks, but to creative people looks matter (I would be somewhat embarrassed for a client to see me show up with one of these).
  2. It’s name, “The Tronix Explorer XT Pure Sine Wave Inverter,” needs some serious work and while it may be a perfectly descriptive name for what it does, it only appeals to Stephen Hawking. You’d have to really be looking for this unit to find it with a non-descriptive name like that

Other than that—-so far, so good.

Where it Totally Rocks
The price. It’s only $394. I know–that rocks!

The Bottomline
I know there are other units showing up on the market, but some want you to use their specific strobes and only warranty the units if you use their strobes, so we were excited when we found these that would specifically work with Elinchroms.  As I use it more and more on upcoming jobs, I’ll let you guys know if my opinion on the Explorer XT changes, but for now it let us do what what we were hoping it would do—-let us use the same studio strobes we’re used to working with day in/day out out on location, and it did it well.

Here’s the link with more info from the Innovatroix Web site.