Professional-Quality Compact Flash. Don’t let the A1 AirTTL-N Studio Light’s compact build fool you—it’s a Profoto light through and through. Its round 2.75-inch tilting and rotating head produces stunning, natural-looking light with soft, gradual fall-off. It boasts an LED modeling light to help you set up your shots, and a built-in magnetic mount that lets you easily install, uninstall, and stack the included dome diffuser, wide lens, and bounce card. The head’s auto-zoom covers focal lengths from 32 to 105mm, while the wide lens gives you wide-angle coverage in the 14 to 24mm range.

Fast, Powerful Performance. The A1 gives you an array of flash durations from 1/800 to 1/20,000 second, while using High-Speed Sync lets you shoot at shutter speeds as fast as 1/8,000 second for great background blur when using a wide aperture. Its 0.05- to 1.2-second recycle time is markedly faster than most other flashes in its class, so you won’t have to worry about missing your shot.

Versatility. The A1 is a superlative on-camera flash, but it also excels in off-camera applications. Its built-in transceiver means you can use it with B2s, D2s, other A1s, and with B1 and B1X monolights. Any Air Remote wireless controller can trigger the A1 at up to 1,000 feet, and the Air Sync will let you wirelessly trigger the A1, and adjust its power, grouping, channel-selection, and modeling-light settings. Better yet, the built-in AirTTL lets you use the A1 to easily connect to and control other Profoto flashes.

High-Capacity Battery with Fast Recharge. The lithium-ion battery provides about 350 full-power flashes per charge with no performance fade, or up to thousands of flashes when you lower the power output. You can’t use an AC adapter to power this strobe—it’s battery-powered only. Once its battery is depleted, you’ll have to swap or recharge it before you can continue shooting. On the upside, the battery recharges in 80 minutes tops.

Intuitive Design. In true Profoto fashion, the A1’s simple interface and large, white-on-black LED combine to make it easy to use right out of the box.