Godox X2t transmitter review: bigger than Godox X1t, but smaller than Godox Xpro

An overview of the Godox X2T radio syn­chro­niz­er (trans­mit­ter) which is also use­ful to those who are look­ing for a Russ­ian instruc­tion or user man­u­al for the Godox X2T trans­mit­ter.

Introduction

Until recent­ly, the choice of radio syn­chro­niz­ers (trans­mit­ters) from Godox was small. There were only two options: either the “small” Godox X1T, released back in 2015, where there were not very con­ve­nient con­trols and a small screen, or the “large” Godox Xpro, where the con­trols were much more ergonom­ic and there was a fair­ly large screen that dis­played every­thing at once. options.

Per­son­al­ly, I have been using the Godox X1t trans­mit­ter for sev­er­al years now. unlike the Godox Xpro, it is much more com­pact, and sit­u­a­tions where I would need an instant and sig­nif­i­cant change in the para­me­ters of the remote flash groups are sev­er­al times less like­ly than the like­li­hood of hook­ing a flash mount­ed on the cam­era or a larg­er syn­chro­niz­er, such as Godox XPro or YN560TX.

And in Feb­ru­ary of this year, at the WPPI exhi­bi­tion, Godox announced a new syn­chro­niz­er mod­el, name­ly the Godox X2T. And more detailed infor­ma­tion appeared only in May. The announce­ment men­tioned:

• mod­i­fied inter­face on the graph­ic dis­play
• five direct group selec­tion but­tons (A/B/C/D/E)
• select but­ton “all groups”
• built-in Blue­tooth for smart­phone con­trol
• but­ton illu­mi­na­tion
• con­trol but­ton lock
• USB TypeC port for firmware upgrade
• chan­nel scan func­tion to find the least loaded
• pow­er adjust­ment in steps of 0.1EV
• set­tings of mod­el­ing light and sound sig­nal at once for the entire select­ed group of flash­es
• graph­ic menu

After read­ing the announce­ment, I was look­ing for­ward to the release of the updat­ed mod­el of the Godox X2T trans­mit­ter and tried to get my hands on them for review. And I suc­ceed­ed, I got Godox X2T‑C syn­chro­niz­ers for Canon and Godox X2T‑N for Nikon. And at the time of writ­ing this review, a ver­sion of the Godox X2T‑S trans­mit­ter for Sony is already avail­able for order, and Godox X2T‑F for Fuji, Godox X2T‑O for Olym­pus / Pana­son­ic and Godox X2T‑P for Pen­tax are expect­ed.

Well, let’s take a look at Godox X2T and com­pare it with its pre­de­ces­sor, Godox X1T. I’ll start with the char­ac­ter­is­tics.

Features of Godox X2t:

• Com­pat­i­bil­i­ty: E‑TTL (X2T‑C Canon), iTTL (X2T‑N Nikon), TTL (X2T‑S Sony), TTL (X2T‑F Fuji­film), TTL (X2T‑O Olympus/Panasonic), TTL (X2T- P Pen­tax), any cam­eras via PCSync.
• TTL: yes
• Man­u­al pow­er con­trol (M): yes
• Sup­port for simul­ta­ne­ous oper­a­tion of mul­ti­ple syn­chro­niz­ers: yes
• High speed sync (HSS/FP): yes
• Sec­ond cur­tain oper­a­tion: yes
• Expo­sure Com­pen­sa­tion (FEC): ‑3…+3EV in 1/3EV steps
• Flash expo­sure lock (FEL): yes
• Aut­o­fo­cus light: yes
• Set­tings mem­o­ry: yes
• Firmware update: yes
• Remote flash zoom con­trol: yes, man­u­al or auto
• Work­ing dis­tance: 0–100 meters
• Oper­at­ing fre­quen­cy: 2.4GHz
• Chan­nels: 32
• Sup­port wire­less ID: yes, 01–99
• Groups: Five (A/B/C/D/E)
• Dis­play: back­lit dot matrix LCD
• Pow­er: 2 AA
• Dimen­sions: 72x70x58mm
• Weight: 90g

Equipment and appearance

The box­es are dec­o­rat­ed in dark col­ors, and only in the cor­ner there is a men­tion under which sys­tem the trans­mit­ter is packed in a par­tic­u­lar box.

On the reverse side, the capa­bil­i­ties of the radio syn­chro­niz­er are clear­ly shown, but I’d rather show you a pic­ture from the manufacturer’s web­site:

There is noth­ing else on the box.

well, except that there are a few pic­tograms) After all, the most inter­est­ing thing is, of course, it is inside the box.

Man­u­al in Eng­lish and Chi­nese (there is cur­rent­ly no instruc­tion in Russ­ian for the Godox X2T trans­mit­ter, and it is unlike­ly that it will appear), war­ran­ty card, QCPass car­ton and a con­stant com­pan­ion of new elec­tron­ics, a bag of sil­i­ca gel.

And here they are, the long-await­ed trans­mit­ters Godox X2T‑C for Canon and Godox X2T‑N for Nikon. But it is absolute­ly not inter­est­ing to com­pare them with each oth­er, because they dif­fer, well, except, of course, for the let­ter in the mod­el name, only with addi­tion­al hot shoe con­tacts. And so I pro­pose to com­pare them with Godox X1T‑N:

As you can see, the test but­ton has moved from the right side to the left side, high­light­ed group selec­tion but­tons have been added, and the Blue­tooth icon has appeared.

On the left side, the changes are only cos­met­ic: dif­fer­ent pow­er switch­es and aut­o­fo­cus back­light.

But on the right side, alas, the sync and USB con­nec­tors lose the rub­ber plug. It’s a pity.

On the front side, every­thing is the same, behind the red win­dow there is an aut­o­fo­cus back­light LED.

The X2T is slight­ly taller than the X1T, main­ly due to the fact that now the syn­chro­niz­er is fixed in the hot shoe not with a wash­er, but with a quick lock.

More of the changes, more sig­nif­i­cant: the trans­mit­ter is now shift­ed to the left side of the hot shoe and it no longer over­laps the top LCD screen of the cam­era; the illu­mi­nat­ed but­tons and the wheel have also been moved to the left side; the enlarged screen became graph­ic and much more infor­ma­tive. And got a brighter back­light. There was even a bat­tery lev­el indi­ca­tor.

By the way, the but­tons to the left of the LCD screen have dual func­tions:

• mode — mode selec­tion TTL/M/— for the select­ed group or groups of flash units, and when held long-term, con­trol lock. Use­ful if you do not want to acci­den­tal­ly knock down the set­tings.
• Menu — enter the user set­tings menu. Long press turns the mod­el­ing light on or off.
• set — instal­la­tion / selec­tion. Hold­ing down fires all flash groups in M ​​mode.

Custom Functions

The cus­tom func­tions menu now includes more options, I’ll go through them briefly:

• Sync — enable high-speed sync (HSS/FP) or rear-cur­tain mode (Rear / Sec­ond cur­tain sync)

• BLUE.T. — turn on Blue­tooth

• BEER — turn on sound con­fir­ma­tion

• ZOOM — remote flash unit zoom con­trol (AUTO/24–200)

• SCAN — scan the band to find the most suit­able chan­nels. Scan­ning takes approx­i­mate­ly half a minute and then dis­plays chan­nels with the least amount of inter­fer­ence and min­i­mal inter­fer­ence.

• CH — chan­nel selec­tion (01–32)

• ID — Godox flash­es with the lat­est firmware ver­sions, in addi­tion to the chan­nel num­ber, can also use the trans­mit­ter ID (01–99) to iden­ti­fy “friend or foe”, which allows sev­er­al pho­tog­ra­phers to work simul­ta­ne­ous­ly on one chan­nel with­out inter­fer­ing with each oth­er.

• PC SYNC — the mode of oper­a­tion of the syn­chro­niza­tion con­nec­tor, for input or out­put, for use via cable with cam­eras with­out a burn­ing shoe, flash meters, oth­er syn­chro­niz­ers and oth­er trig­ger devices.

• DELAY — remote flash fir­ing delay in high-speed sync mode (FP / HSS), up to 9.9ms in steps of 0.1

• SHOOT — A very inter­est­ing para­me­ter, I will dwell on it in more detail.

Its essence is that, by default, syn­chro­niz­ers send para­me­ters to slave flash units only when they change, and when shoot­ing for groups of flash units oper­at­ing in M ​​or Mul­ti modes, only a trig­ger sig­nal is sent, which allows you to save bat­tery pow­er a lit­tle. This is suit­able for the case when one pho­tog­ra­ph­er shoots (one mandefault).

If it is nec­es­sary that sev­er­al pho­tog­ra­phers simul­ta­ne­ous­ly work with the same flash units, then the “mul­ti­ple pho­tog­ra­phers” mode should be select­ed (three men), in which case the trans­mit­ter will send the set­tings to the slave flash units every time a pic­ture is tak­en. Of course, in this mode, the con­sump­tion will be some­what high­er.

By the way, the same mode will be con­ve­nient if you shoot with two cam­eras, with two syn­chro­niz­ers on them. This will allow you not to be dis­tract­ed by turn­ing the syn­chro­niz­ers on and off on the cam­eras.

When APP is select­ed, the syn­chro­niz­er will only send a sig­nal to fire, and the con­trol of the oper­a­tion para­me­ters of remote flash units will be car­ried out only from the appli­ca­tion from the smart­phone.

• DIST — choice of work­ing dis­tance 1–100 meters or 0–30. The same choice is in the Godox Xpro trans­mit­ter, but on the Godox X1T there is no such choice, and many com­plained that the remote flash does not fire when it is locat­ed next to the syn­chro­niz­er. How­ev­er, in the instruc­tions (but only who reads them) to the Godox X1T syn­chro­niz­er, it is writ­ten that to switch to the 0–30 mode, you need to hold down the test but­ton and turn on the syn­chro­niz­er. The syn­chro­niz­er should flash the sta­tus LED twice to sig­nal the tran­si­tion to 0–30m mode.

• STEP — pow­er con­trol range and step, the fol­low­ing options are avail­able: 1/128(0.3), 1/256(0.3), 1/128(0.1), 1/256(0.1), 3.0(0.1), 2.0(0.1). Of course, adjust­ing the pow­er in incre­ments of 0.1EV is cer­tain­ly cool, but in prac­tice such accu­ra­cy is rarely required. But the fact that such an oppor­tu­ni­ty exists is good. It is bet­ter to let there be redun­dant, although unused oppor­tu­ni­ties, than vice ver­sa.

• GROUP — switch­ing between work with three (AC) or five groups (AE).

• STBY — set­ting the time for the syn­chro­niz­er to go into low pow­er mode (sleep) when not in use.

• LIGHT — Man­age­ment of the oper­at­ing time of the back­light of the screen and but­tons.

• LCD — set­ting the con­trast of the LCD screen from ‑3 to 3. In my opin­ion, the changes are hard­ly notice­able.

Smartphone control via Bluetooth transmitter Godox X2T

Find in Google Play (IOS ver­sion is also avail­able), install, launch, go to Blue­tooth,

Search­ing, Con­nect­ingwho has not read the Godox X2t man­u­al, the default pass­word is 000000), we use.

it is pos­si­ble to select a chan­nel, import and export set­tings, and Mul­ti (strobe) mode

Below the groups is a but­ton to add (acti­vate) addi­tion­al flash groups, and if you click on any group, you can set indi­vid­ual para­me­ters for the group, such as pow­er or expo­sure com­pen­sa­tion, mod­el­ing light pow­er, oper­at­ing mode and min­i­mum pow­er.

In gen­er­al, there is the abil­i­ty to con­trol Godox flash­es from a smart­phone, but because. I don’t see a need for this func­tion­al­i­ty, I clicked, tried, smiled, took screen­shots and left it at that. The fact is that I didn’t like how the flash pow­er cor­rec­tion was orga­nized: if on flash­es or a trans­mit­ter the jog dial allows you to imme­di­ate­ly sig­nif­i­cant­ly adjust the pow­er, then in the appli­ca­tion one swipe changes the pow­er by only 1EV, and a fin­er cor­rec­tion is pos­si­ble only by click­ing on “minus” and “plus” to the right and left of the cur­rent indi­ca­tor. It may seem con­ve­nient to some­one, but per­son­al­ly to me — no.

It may be pos­si­ble to con­trol flash set­tings from a smart­phone appli­ca­tion for those who take pic­tures from a tri­pod when the cam­era must remain sta­tion­ary, for exam­ple, when shoot­ing sub­ject mat­ter, because in this case the cam­era and syn­chro­niz­er can not be touched at all.

Comparisons and Conclusions

If we com­pare the Godox X1T syn­chro­niz­er released back in 2015 and the Godox X2T trans­mit­ter released in 2019, we have the fol­low­ing:

• more con­ve­nient oper­a­tion, with but­tons for direct selec­tion of the desired group of remote flash units
• improved screen, which became larg­er, got bet­ter back­light­ing and became graph­ic
• due to the fact that the screen of the Godox X2T trans­mit­ter is now graph­i­cal, the user set­tings menu items now have clear and under­stand­able names, and not like in the Godox X1T trans­mit­ter, where the user set­tings were encrypt­ed under Fn.XX codes and you had to remem­ber which num­ber cor­re­sponds to which func­tion
• mode of simul­ta­ne­ous oper­a­tion of sev­er­al pho­tog­ra­phers (syn­chro­niz­ers) with one set of remote flash units
• the abil­i­ty to set para­me­ters from a smart­phone via Blue­tooth
• the abil­i­ty to lock the trans­mit­ter con­trols to pre­vent acci­den­tal changes to the set­tings of remote flash units
• the abil­i­ty to turn on mod­el­ing light and speak­er for remote flash units
• switch­ing range modes from 1–100m to 0–30m is now in the menu
• pow­er adjust­ment in steps of 0.1EV
• but­ton illu­mi­na­tion
• search for the most suit­able chan­nels
• lock wash­er replaced with quick lock

But there were also sev­er­al, in my opin­ion, dete­ri­o­ra­tions, name­ly:

• stan­dard PCSync con­nec­tor replaced with jack
• sync con­nec­tor and USB con­nec­tor for firmware updates lose the rub­ber plug
• there is no mode of oper­a­tion only on the cen­tral con­tact, which came in handy sev­er­al times

In my opin­ion, Godox X2T has come close to Godox Xpro in terms of func­tion­al­i­ty, it is worse only in such para­me­ters:

• a small­er screen on which only the para­me­ters of three groups are placed at the same time (Godox Xpro has all five). And in most cas­es, three groups is enough. Judge for your­self: group A — draw­ing, B — fill­ing, and C — either back (con­tour) light or back­ground.
• there is no TCM but­ton (TTL-Con­vert-Man­u­al, for a quick and com­fort­able tran­si­tion from TTL mode to man­u­al pow­er con­trol mode, with copy­ing the used pow­er val­ues ​​from TTL to Man­u­al)
• less intu­itive con­trol of the zoom posi­tion of remote flash units and the inabil­i­ty to indi­vid­u­al­ly set the zoom posi­tion for each indi­vid­ual group of remote flash units
• few­er con­trols (but­tons)

After sev­er­al shoot­ings, I can say that the con­trol has become much more con­ve­nient: now you can hold the cam­era with your right hand, and com­plete­ly set or change the flash set­tings with your left, unlike the X1T, where either the left hand cov­ered the screen, or you had to inter­cept the cam­era in your left hand and pull it out the right hand from the hand strap to con­trol the syn­chro­niz­er.

After get­ting the trans­mit­ters, I took both the X1T and X2T for the first few shoots to com­pare them in action, and the more I used the X2T, the less I want­ed to go back to the X1T. So I think that Godox man­aged to sig­nif­i­cant­ly improve and rework the “younger” ver­sion of the trans­mit­ter, at the same time suc­cess­ful­ly falling into a niche between Godox X1t and Godox XPro.

On the man­u­fac­tur­er’s web­site, you can read about the Godox X2T trans­mit­ter and down­load the instruc­tions, and when it appears, the new firmware ver­sion.

Godox X2T trans­mit­ters are already avail­able for pur­chase on Ebay and Aliex­press, and will also be avail­able in the gox.com.ua store in just a few days

And of course, on the Ado­ra­ma web­site, where the full range of Godox prod­ucts (under the Flash­point brand) are on sale, the Godox X2T trans­mit­ter is avail­able for pur­chase as the Flash­point R2 Mark II.

PS And it does­n’t mat­ter where you buy the Godox X2T trans­mit­ter, you can addi­tion­al­ly save on this and oth­er pur­chas­es using cash­back ser­vices. I use ePN Cash­back and Letyshops, depend­ing on where the con­di­tions are more favor­able at the time of pur­chase. More­over, they present not only shops, but also ser­vices for book­ing hotels, buy­ing tick­ets, etc.

After all, as Scrooge McDuck, aka Uncle Scrooge, said:

Mon­ey saved is mon­ey earned

Suc­cess­ful shots!