GVI Vari-Strobe

I just picked up an old GVI Vari-Strobe head for my Norman 200B setup. Anyone ever use one? I bought it out of curiosity, but it really seems like a nice strobe head. They also made a version for Lumedyne.

I think this was the first product of the company that today is known as Quantum, because the instruction manual for it can be found on the Quantum website. It's astounding clunky looking, even by comparison to Norman flash heads, but lightweight and it offers very fine control on low power by a continuous variator, auto thyristor operation, auto fill flash at 1/60 sec. or 1/125 sec., and by my Minolta Flashmeter III, it's dead on accurate. The thyristor circuit saves power on auto, so it gets more flashes per charge. I can always switch it back to manual, and it takes all my Norman reflectors. It is also possible to put the sensor on a remote cord if the head is used with a softbox or large reflector that would otherwise obstruct the sensor or an umbrella that would require that the head be facing in the wrong direction.

Norman made a competing unit (the LH3 head) around the same time, but it doesn't seem to have been made for a very long time. I'm happy using manual flash with a distance/exposure chart, but this seems quite handy and more versatile.

Now that I've got a working scanner for medium and large format transparencies, I can post some test results here. It turns out that despite its primitive appearance, this unit can do auto (non-TTL) fill flash quite accurately. I'll post a test shot in the Technical Gallery.

Maybe I'm just talking to myself here, but if anyone is interested in such things--

My Vari-Strobe started strobing a couple of months ago and then stopped working altogether. It was pretty beat up, so I just tossed it, rather than having it repaired, and as it happens, I found a Norman LH3b auto strobe head to replace it.

The Norman is physically a better design. The head tilts, and it has a solid flat base for mounting on a bracket (the GVI's was a little wobbly). The remote sensor uses a simple stereo mini-plug, instead of the 5-pin DIN connector that the GVI used. There's a little more space between the flash tube and the sensor, so there's more room for slightly larger reflectors without having to use a remote sensor cable.

The unit I have underexposes by about a stop. This is easy enough to adjust for (just set the calculator dial to one stop less than the actual film speed), but I wonder if a previous owner had it calibrated that way to use it as outdoor fill flash.

The auto function does work--I can change reflectors/diffusers or use bounce flash and come up with the same aperture on my flash meter.

The Norman doesn't have the auto-fill feature that the GVI had or the manually adjustable low power settings, but it does have manual fractional power settings down to 1/16, and it seems able to produce a flash of less than 1/16 in auto mode.

The GVI had no range setting, but the Norman gives you a choice of five overlapping distance ranges, and therefore more possible f:stops in any given situation, which makes up somewhat for the lack of auto-fill, since you could set the flash on auto to "underexpose" by whatever fill ratio you wanted and do auto-fill that way.