Is there a easy way to globally turn off the reflections of all materials in the scene easily? other than selecting the materials and editing them that way ... is there a render setting to turn off reflection?

in your render settings optimisation tab, turn the secondary rays - reflection slider down to 0.

Put an override on your partition. override the render property (visibility>reflection ray caster and/or reflection visible).
This way, any transparencies will still be visible/rendered

CMIIW.

[quote=1nfern0;8230]Put an override on your partition. override the render property (visibility>reflection ray caster and/or reflection visible).
This way, any transparencies will still be visible/rendered

CMIIW.

No need to mess around with overrides. Changing the reflections slider has no effect on refraction, that’s a separate slider.

having reread your post ... yes, it’s simpler your way.
don’t know why, every time I read ‘secondary ray’, the first thing that comes into my mind is ‘turning off secondary ray’ ...  maybe also because in 5.11 (my current version) they’re still called raytracing depth ..

my bad ... :)