Off camera/external flash

<p>Hello,<br>

I own a <a href="https://esupport.sony.com/US/p/model-home.pl?mdl=DSCP8">Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P8</a>. This camera does not have a hot shoe. It does have a sync cable for the pc though. Is it possible to connect an off-camera/external flash to this camera without a hot shoe? If not, are there adapters that would help me do this?</p>

<p>By PC do you mean a computer ( USB cable)? If so then that won't help you. If you mean that the camera has a PC flash terminal (standard on many cameras since the 1940's) then you should be able to connect an external flash on a bracket that would attach to the tripod socket on the bottom of the camera. If you buy a flash make sure that the synch voltage is low so that you don't fry the camera. Figuring out exposure may be interesting, depending on how much manual control you have with this camera.</p>

<p>Sorry, forget it. - I just dug out my DSC - P10. It has an USB cable to connect to Personal Computer but no Prontor Compur socket an external flash would need.<br>

I did a quick test attempting to fire an external flash with optical slave sensor via the built in one. My flash did go off but <strong>not</strong> in an exposure relevant way. The internal flash most likely fires 2 times; once to determine the needed amount of lighting and a 2nd time to actually light the picture. The slave sensor of my external flash gets triggered by the pre-flash. <br>

I recommend getting another camera. Some similar vintage models should be in a new adapter's price range by now.</p>

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<p>My flash did go off but <strong>not</strong> in an exposure relevant way.</p>

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<p>Somehow, Jochen, that tickled my fancy. I've had a lot of that sort of experience....<br>

Thanks. :)</p>

<p>Does that camera have a red-eye reduction option? This is usually a pre-flash that causes the subjects irises to close down, reducing the amount of light reflecting off of their retinas, which is what causes red-eye.</p>

<p>The other possibility is that it uses a pre-flash for exposure control, the way modern dslrs do.</p>

<p>There are optical slaves or flashes with built in slave sensors, that can be set to ignore the pre-flash and only fire when they see the second or third flash.</p>

<p>The other problem is that, unless you have a camera and a flash "system" made by the same manufacturer, chances are, you are going to have to set the exposure manually, which is sometimes difficult on point-and-shoot cameras. The camera knows about its own flash, but can not compensate for the additional light provided by the external flash.</p>

<p>In a case like this, I did try to sync "manually" and the successful rate at that time was 50%. By manually sync, I set aperture to about F5.6, F8 with shutter speed about 1/2, 1/4 and manually release the flash together with shooting the camera.</p>