From: Larry Colen
On Sat, Aug 01, 2009 at 11:45:02AM -0400, Adam Maas wrote:
> The Sigma flashes have a well-earned reputation for being cheap junk.
> They're both cheaply built and also very rarely actually fully
> compatible with the flash protocol they claim to support.
That's good to know.
>
> Metz on the other hand makes superb kit.
If I stick with Pentax, I may well need to find something to replace
my AF540. I swear that I spend more time fighting that POS than I do
with it operating correctly.
Sometimes P-TTL works beautifully, sometimes I just get something
about four stops underexposed. That, however, may be the camera,
someone said that they tried a K-7 and where the K20 metered on the
reflection of the flash the K-7 metered on the rest of the scene.
Since I can't trust P-TTL to work properly, or may have other reasons
to shoot in manual flash mode, I frequently want to. My AF-540 will
not stay in manual mode. It'll work in manual for a while and will
then spontaneously decide that what I really need is P-TTL.
I even sent it in to be repaired. They replaced a bunch of the
circuitry, but it still decides it knows better than me what I want.
I don't think it's possible to "repair" it so it won't do that. My
experience with the AF-540 is it will stay in whatever mode you set it
in until it powers itself down to save the batteries.
When it powers up again it reverts to P-TTL and I think that's the way
Pentax designed it.
Another peeve is that there is no manual control over the in camera
flash. I have studio strobes that can be optically triggered, but
there seems to be no way of doing so without putting a little dumb
external flash on my camera. It would be so simple to have a menu item
to run the flash manually at full power down to 1/16 at 1/2 stop
intervals.
I wonder if setting the flash compensation for the built in flash to
-2EV and fitting a small deflector to bounce it up to the ceiling would
work?
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