flash sync

[Curious]

got out my old minolta 320X flash. it has a bad hot shoe but will work mounted on the XD11 using the pc sync cord.

first of all the hot shoe shape has changed and this flash won’t slip onto the maxxum 7D hot shoe mount. are there adapter mounts available? perhaps one of those off to the side things.

secondly the test results seen here show that the sync isn’t working properly. even when the flash fires the shutter speed is off and the results have camera movement in them. when you look at “more properties” the information there says no flash and long exposure times.

i’m confused.

[sleeping]

PC synch circuits are completely “dumb” – there’s no communication at all between the flash and the camera, so the camera doesn’t know there’s a flash present and is metering for the ambient light.

You can get standard hotshoe adapters for the funky Minolta Maxxum shoe, but the minolta X series flashes don’t have TTL circuitry, so there wouldn’t be a whole lot benefit to using one over the PC cord (it might automatically set the flash to the max synch speed and register in the exif data, but that’s about all, I think).

You ought to be able to use the auto setting on the flash (which uses a metering cell on the flash itself) though, if you manually set the camera to the max synch speed and the correct auto aperture for your ISO (based on the calculator on the back of the flash).

[Curious]

thanks, i was afraid of that. will do some more testing and see what happens. a new multi hundred dollar flash is out of the question right now.

[schnee]

The Vivitar 285HV has auto settings (via a metering cell) and can go pretty darn manual. Cost $90.

[Author]

Posts