daveish182 Posted August 31, 2006 Share Posted August 31, 2006 Hi, I'm always reading about the danger of using older flash units on modern SLRs but would it be safe to use a hotshoe to pc adapter and fire the flash through its pc socket off camera? Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael_madio Posted August 31, 2006 Share Posted August 31, 2006 Check the manual to find out what the max safe voltage is for your camera. You measure the voltage across the flash contacts with a voltmeter. If the measured voltage is more than what the camera can take, you need isolation of some sort. If you can't be bothered to measure, just get a Wein safe-sync. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jochen_S Posted August 31, 2006 Share Posted August 31, 2006 I agree with Michael. The 110V of my Elinchroms would fry any Pentax. (AFAIK they don't even stand 20V, but I'm lousy at remembering numbers.) You get great Voltmeters for less than $10 today. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wigwam jones Posted August 31, 2006 Share Posted August 31, 2006 Wein makes a small unit that slides into your camera hotshoe and provides a safe circuit no matter what the voltage of your flash - via a hotshoe on top or a PC socket. http://www.weinproducts.com/safesyncs.htm You can test all you like - if you test incorrectly, you could destroy your camera. You can suffer transients that don't show up every time - and destroy your camera. You can read the flash's manual and discover that it has a 'safe' voltage and it turns out not to - and again - destroy your camera. Seems a lot to risk just to try to use an older flash on a newer camera. You won't get most of the benefits of a modern flash on the newer camera anyway, such as P-TTL, so the risk seems to me not to be worth taking. Just my opinion - I would not risk it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
josphy Posted August 31, 2006 Share Posted August 31, 2006 Wow with regards to that Wein website, you'd think a company that sells photography related products would have better photos of their wares! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wigwam jones Posted August 31, 2006 Share Posted August 31, 2006 I agree, but they've been making products for years that fill photographic niches no one else fills. I'm inclined to say who cares what their website looks like. But that's just me - I'm more interested in how a product works than in how slick the brochure for it is. Weird, huh? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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