A couple months ago, after selling my Alien Bee strobes, I decided to go the way of the strobist. After a little research I settled on the Vivitar 285HV as my lightgun of choice, and I picked up two for $90 a piece at B&H.
What I didn’t know, or didn’t pay attention to, was that these Vivitar flashes use a small battery holder, sort of like a cartridge, and without this cartridge (or an AC power adapter), your flash is useless. Of course, the flashes come with a battery holder, but I quickly deduced this could be an accessory that might get lost quick. So I went back to B&H to order a few spares.
They didn’t have stock, and the website gave no indication if any would soon be available. After a month or two of checking back, the listing was updated with a “discontinued” status.
Wait. What?
Web research turned up nothing on the subject, so I contacted Vivitar direct. After a few days of phone tag I finally learned that the battery holders were in fact discontinued and that Vivitar wasn’t even making these flashes anymore. Um… I wish I had known that before I had bought two of them.
So, I went back to searching the web and finally found a guy in Colorado who happened to have a stash of 363 of these things (357 after my order) on sale fro $4.50 a piece… that’s more than half off what B&H had been listing them for when they were merely out of stock. As I mentioned, I ordered six, so that in addition to the one that comes with each unit, I’ll have a total of eight that can be loaded up with rechargeable AA’s just waiting to get popped into a flash.
Oh… the source? It’s uscamera.com. They also have replacement hot shoes that include pc-sync ports for about $10 a throw. Nice.