Anyway, I bought the newest model of wireless remote they have available, the Plato. This one apparently is a big improvement over the model you reviewed. It uses standard AAA batteries in the remote and receiver instead of the expensive and sometimes hard to find lithium ones. Mine has very good feedback from the shutter button. There is an audible click, and you can feel the switch settle at half press, then the button requires a good bit more pressure to press fully, when there is another audible click. The click isn’t very loud, quieter than the shutter in the camera, buy it is audible. The remote and the receiver both have the red and green lights as you mentioned in your review. The Plato goes another step further though. It has two way communication between the remote and receiver. There is a second LED on the remote that duplicates the one on the receiver. You can see if the receiver got the signal or not by watching the remote. I suppose it would be possible, although unlikely, that the receiver got the signal and operated the camera, but the remote didn’t receive the feedback signal. If the second LED didn’t light, you are probably out of range. Also, the Plato does not have an antenna to pull out and possibly break off, but it still has good range.

The Plato also has 4 modes for the button. It has a standard shutter button mode, no explanation needed. It has a 2S mode, where you can press the button, and there is a two second delay before the receiver triggers the shutter. This allows you to be in the picture, and gives you time to hide the remote. You don’t have to set the camera to do this, a simple button press on the remote sets this up. It has a “continuous advance” mode, although this is a bit different that what the camera calls continuous advance mode. My camera (I’m sure probably most do) has a mode where it will take pictures ass fast as it is capable of as long as you hold down the shutter. The Plato has a mode where one press of the button on the remote triggers the camera 5 times at one second intervals, without changing any settings on the camera. The last mode is the bulb mode similar to what you mentioned, except that you don’t have to hold it down for 3 seconds. One full press turns it on, another turns it off. It works with long exposures and with the camera’s built in continuous advance mode. Continuous advance this way works exactly as it would if you were using the camera’s built in shutter button.

Another nice thing about the Plato is that it works in both wired and wireless mode. The wire that attaches the receiver to the camera has a plug on the receiver end similar to the mini headphone jack we are all familiar with used with computer speakers and headphones for iPods, etc. If you plug the cable into the receiver, it works wirelessly. If you don’t need to be wireless, you can plug the cable directly into the remote, and it works as a wired remote with about 20cm of wire.

The Plato also does away with the dip switches for pairing the remote and receiver. It uses built in rolling digital codes much like a modern cordless phone or garage door opener for security. You can even reset the remote/receiver link if you have more than one camera and remote. One remote can simultaneously fire I think as many as 16 million cameras theoretically if you reset the link on that many receivers and you would want to do that. I could see that someone might want to do that with a few cameras to get multiple views of the same scene.

The Plato is available from ebay, seller name Hong Kong Supplies, just like the remote you reviewed. I bought mine for US$45 including shipping. Go to ebay, search for “plato remote” and you will get around 100 or so listings. They are all from the same seller. Look for the one that matches your camera. They have C6 for some Canons, Contax, Pentax, and Samsung, C8 for other Canons, N6, N8 and N10 for Nikons (N8 also works some Fujis and Kodaks), S6 for Sony/Minolta, O6 for Olympus, and P6 for Panasonic. Click on the listing for any one of them, and scroll down the page. There is a fairly complete listing of all the cameras that are compatible and which cable goes with each camera.

Hopefully time permitting I maybe able to get something up in the next 3 weeks.

regards Lyndon