# Recycling time of my new 600ex-rt longer than my old 580EXII??



## PhotoCat (Sep 20, 2013)

Hello all,

Just got my 1st 600ex-rt and tested the recycling time against my old 580EXII at full power,
using 4 eneloop 200mA batteries fully charged. Hard to believe the 600 is recycling slower than my old 580exii.

3.6Sec on 600 versus 2.8Sec on 580. Anyone has similar experience?

Perhaps the 600ex-rt is too new and it takes time for the capacitor to "form"??

Any help would be appreciated.


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## neuroanatomist (Sep 20, 2013)

AFAIK, they have the same capacitor and tube, just an updated, longer zoom head (giving it the higher GN).


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## privatebydesign (Sep 20, 2013)

Mine are all under 2.5 seconds full power pop to full power pop with part used 1900mAh Eneloops.


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## Click (Sep 20, 2013)

privatebydesign said:


> Mine are all under 2.5 seconds full power pop to full power pop with part used 1900mAh Eneloops.



Same here, under 3 sec with Eneloops 1900 mAh.


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## agierke (Sep 20, 2013)

Did you use the same batteries? If not, a faulty battery could be the culprit. If you didn't use the same batteries in the test, retest with new Enegizers from the same package. That will eliminate that variable and reveal true recycle time differences between the two heads. You can then use the Enegizers for your tv remotes...


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## PhotoCat (Sep 20, 2013)

Thank you for all your kind replies. Highly appreciated!

My bad! I thought I was using all freshly charged eneloops
and I was. So I was just doing a few pop tests with a flash meter
to compare the light output between 580exii and 600ex-rt.

What I didn't realize was that these pop tests sucked up some juice
from the 600 batteries while the 580 batteries remained "more fresh".
And hence the weird results. As Agierke had thankfully mentioned, u have got to be
using the same set of AA batteries to do the comparison.

i.e. put the 4 AA's inside 600 and then pop test; after that take out the same
4 AA from 600 and put that into 580 and pop test again. To be sure, one
should take out the same batteries from 580 and put them back into 600 and 
pop test again to confirm the 1st reading. This will hopefully ensure the batteries
haven't discharged much during the pop tests.

BTW, fyi, the average recycling time on 600ex-rt was 2.44Sec on 4 freshly charged eneloop AA 2000mAH.
While the 580exii was 2.75Sec on the same set of battery.


Thank you all for your inputs once again!


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## PhotoCat (Sep 25, 2013)

Unfortunately I have to open up this thread again.

I finally discovered that my 600 is vy voltage sensitive with regard to recycling time. 
Freshly charged Eneloop AA batteries give a recycling time of 2.4S and it beats my 580exii.
However, when I use eneloops
charged just 2 days ago gives > 3.2S and it is worse than my 580exii (2.8S), using the same 4 cells.

Also Click mentioned he achieved 2.5S with partly used eneloops!

I think this is unacceptable and I am going to exchange my 600ex-rt.

Thank you all for your help! John


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## PhotoCat (Oct 5, 2013)

This is a followup to my initial posting.
So I got another brand new 600-ex-rt and tested it again versus my old 580exii.
Same problem... i.e. 600 recycles slightly faster with freshly charged batteries. 
This seemed good at the beginning but when I repeated the test with batteries charged 2 days ago,
the 580exii became slightly faster.

This is a bit puzzling so I checked out the spec of the eneloop AA battery. It said 0.025ohms for internal resistance.
Then I tested my 2-3 years old eneloop AA's; surely enough, they have degraded to a range of 0.080-0.120ohms.

Ah... my eneloop AA batteries are old and have higher internal resistance!

So this seems to be telling me that for recycling time alone, the 600ex-rt works well with batteries with low internal resistance but
it doesn't work so well compared to the 580ex-ii with older batteries with increased internal resistance.

Is anyone seeing the same thing? I start questioning if 600ex-rt beats 580exii hands down in all categories.


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