Pocket Wizard, or not?

I have been contemplating at the Pocket Wizard. It sounds like a fantastic way of triggering one or more flash guns remotely. I even found a number of knock-offs that could work like the Pocket Wizard on eBay.

But then, what about the IR wireless trigger built in the D80 and D300? Would it not work just as well as the Pocket Wizard?

I need to do some research before shelling out some more bucks for this cool accessory.

Fill-in flash in bright daylight

I am confused. The other day I was at Centre Island taking pictures of friends participating in a dragonboat festival. It was a bright day with a fair amount of sun. I thought I could just connect my SB-800 speedlight to my new D300 and the camera will just know what to do with the flash. Well, all the background of all the shots I took with flash was over-exposed. The highest speed the camera could be cranked up to was 1/320 sec. I could not figure out it could not go higher. I had set the D300 in Aperture Priority mode.

I just re-read an article I wrote in 2008 about using the SB-800 with my D80:

http://photonfarmers.blogspot.com/2008/09/d80-and-sb-800-high-speed-flash-sync.html

In the last paragraph of the article, I said the D80 would not be able to shoot faster than 1/60 sec in Aperture Priority mode with the hotshoe flash on. It would sound like what happened on the island ... except that today, I thought I'd retest the SB-800 with both the D300 and D80 in Aperture Priority mode.

In both cases, with the SB-800 mounted, I pointed the camera at a bright scene that required a high shutter speed of exposure, like 1/2500 sec. I expected the camera shutter speed to be set automatically to 1/60 sec. To my surprise, the shutter speed adjusted appropriately to 1/2500 sec.

I thought, from my earlier 2008 experiment, that the maximum shutter sync speed in Aperture Priority mode is 1/60 sec (if a faster speed is desired, the D80 needed to be in Shutter Priority or Manual mode.) It does not appear to be the case. It worked fine in Aperture Priority. Could a newer firmware I might have upgraded the camera with, allowed for faster shutter sync speeds with the SB-800??

It does not explain what happened at the island though. Maybe I did not set the D300 to sync with the hotshoe flash in FP mode, as I do not recall seeing the "FP" mode on the SB-800 LCD panel. The "FP" mode needs to be turned on for the camera to sync with the SB-800 up to the camera's own maximum shutter speed. It could also be that I did *not* use the SB-800. I might have just used the built-in flash, which I think was limited to 1/320 sec.

In any case, I am now more ready for a wedding in a couple of weeks. I am sure my relatives will want their pictures taken everywhere, so I had better be ready for it.