MIOPS Smart Trigger Review – A Powerful and Versatile Gadget!

A Closer Look

As you can see,  the MIOPS Smart Trigger is a very compact piece of hardware. It’s made mainly out of plastic and the buttons are made of synthetic rubber. It feels solid, perhaps even a bit “rugged”, but like with every single piece of photography equipment, I would strongly suggest that you pay attention and take good care of the unit while using it.

For example, it isn’t waterproof, thus if you are going to use it near liquids or in the rain, make sure you cover it with something.

On the side of the MIOPS Smart Trigger we have a rubber piece covering the input/output jacks, while on the bottom of the unit we have a standard hot-shoe mount with a tripod mounting hole on the bottom. We can easily mount the unit on the camera using the hot-shoe and if we want to have the unit closer to our “target” we can use a tripod (here’s where we find a conflict, preventing us from using it straight ahead out of the box, the cables are rather short, we need to do some DIY in order to extend them).

The other sides of the unit have no connectors or use, except the top side of the Smart Trigger which facilitates the laser receiver (this is where you need to be pointing your laser pointer to use the “Laser” mode).

The screen is easily readable, it doesn’t claim any image quality awards nor it is bright enough, but it gets the job done. The buttons are easy to use, but the middle two can become a little annoying for those out there with stubby fingers. Don’t worry about it, you can use your smartphone or tablet to control the MIOPS Smart Trigger via Bluetooth, which saves you the trip to the unit as well.

Like I mentioned before, the MIOPS Smart Trigger is… pretty smart, it can work with all kinds of camera brands and speedlights as long as you have the right cables to connect them.

The cable and connector quality is great, what I would like to see however is more choices regarding the cable lengths perhaps some adapters or other kinds of plugs (I had to DIY my cables to extend them, and also DIY the plugs to be able to connect the MIOPS to my wireless speedlight trigger). I said camera brands and speedlights, because there are two ways you can use this trigger:

• Connect it to your camera and have it open/close your shutter
• Connect it to your speedlight/s (directly or via a wireless controller to trigger multiple flashes without resorting to “slave flash” optical trigger mode) and trigger the camera manually in Bulb mode.

If you need help adapting your cables to work with your gear drop me a message, I’ll gladly assist you in reverse engineering your connectors.