Profoto A10 AirTTL-C Studio Light for Canon

Building on the success and popularity of the A1X, Profoto introduces an enhanced version, the A10 AirTTL-C Studio Light for Canon. The A10 has the same powerful battery that gets 450 full-power flashes instead of 350, fast full-power recycling time of one second, and 20 wireless channels. What’s ground-breaking about the A10 is that you can sync it with your iPhone camera. The camera app syncs your iPhone with the A10 over Bluetooth connection – no additional hardware attachments needed. The App enables you to precisely control the A10’s flash tube power, its LED modelling light, and also control all other standard camera settings: shutter speed, ISO sensitivity and white balance in 1/3 EV steps. You can take photos in different image formats: HEIF, JPG, or raw. It even has a self-timer! Instead of sending an approximation of a shot to a colleague or client, email or text an actual professionally lit image. You can even download future firmware upgrades to the A10 through your smartphone.

The A10 was created for the professional photographer looking for portability and performance features or the ambitious non-professional who recognizes quality lighting but wants it comfortably and easily without the hassle of an overly technical interface. The A10 is easy to use. You can literally take it out of the box and start shooting. Weighing 1.2 lb including its battery, the A10’s sleek matte black finish not only appeals to the eye but to the tactile sense as well.

The first thing you’ll notice about the A10 is its 2.75″ round, tilting, rotating head, which is the physical feature most responsible for the A1X’s natural-looking light with its soft gradual fall-off. The auto-zoom built into the head handles focal lengths from 32 to 105mm, while an optional Wide Lens gives you wide-angle coverage from 14 to 24mm. You can override the auto-zoom function at any time and make your adjustments manually. A filter kit with graduated CTO conversion filters and a fluorescent filter is also separately available to modify the unit’s daylight color temperature.

The A10 recycles in one second, faster than most flash units in its class and has action-stopping flash durations from 1/800 to 1/20,000 second. The A10 supports HSS (High-Speed Sync) allowing you to shoot at shutter speeds as short a 1/8000 second instead of 1/250 to blur a distracting background using a wide aperture while controlling strong ambient light behind your subject. The 76Ws head has an LED modeling light that can give you a preview of how the light is falling on your subject. It can be turned on or off, set to automatically adjust proportionally to the power level selected, or just switched to manual where it can be modified by hand. All adjustments are indicated on the exceptionally readable white on black LCD display.

The A10 is powered by an included lithium-ion battery that has a capacity of 450 full-power flashes (instead of the previous model’s 350). Power is topped up on an exhausted battery in about 80 minutes with the included 100-240 VAC charger. The battery doesn’t fade as its power is used, operating at peak performance until it’s depleted. Purchase of an additional battery is recommended.

So far, we’ve been discussing the A10 used on-camera but when used off-camera, it really earns its name as a “Studio Light.” The flash has a built-in transceiver that allows it to be used with other A10s, A1s, A1Xs, B2s, or D2, B1, B1X, and B10 monolights. All the Air Remote wireless controllers can trigger the A1X at distances up to 1000′ and the Air Sync will give you simple wireless triggering, while the Air Remote will let you wirelessly adjust power, grouping, channel selection, and modeling light on/off. It’s the Air Remote TTL that allows you to explore and control the A10’s full capabilities. It wirelessly allows assignment of channels and groups as well as TTL and power level. In fact, the A10 has a switch that allows you to set your main light to TTL, switch to manual operation to adjust manual units in other groups to ratio their output, then switch back to TTL and return to the original TTL setting that was stored for you. The A10 also has +/-3 stops of exposure compensation that can be modified from the remote for your specific needs. The light also comes with a Bounce Card, Flash Stand, and a nylon bag with shoulder strap for storage and transport.