I am shoppping for a digital camera for my company, largely at customer insistance. All of our shots will be indoor with little or no ambient lighting. A proportion of the shots will require UV lighting. Presently we use a large UV flash with our film cameras. Obviously I looked first at megapixel digital cameras which support external flashes. There are a limited number of models in the "prosumer" category. I am concerned that even the cameras with PC flash sync output still need to use use their internal flashes (external flash is "supplementary"-this is stated explicitly for the ePhoto 1680). I dont want any visible light on the subject. Any guidance? Can I use a slave trigger with a cheaper camera such as 600L?

-- Richard V. Hughes (rhughes@microcraft.com), February 18, 1999

Answers

The Kodak DC260 has an external flash connection and when one is plugged in the camera's internal flash is disabled, so that should work for what you want, I think.

-- Robert S. Duran (bkd@icok.net), February 22, 1999.

Richard- Slave triggers should definitely work - Polaroid for a while was selling a "studio kit" that consisted of a cup that fit over the flash head with a slave inside. This completely hid the on-camera flash, and let you use only the light from the external strobes. One note though: Many cameras "pre-flash" their strobes, to set the white balance. SR Electronics (www.srelectronics.com) sells slave triggers that will trip on the *second* flash, but I don't know what the effect on the white balance would be the first metering flash wasn't seen by the camera. - On cameras with a manual white-balance setting, you can probably get around the problem by forcing the white balance to "flash" or "daylight". The Oly D-600L doesn't have manual white- balance settings, but the D-620L does, as well as a number of other digicams. - We report the white balance options in our reviews, under the section titled "Exposure", but don't have an entry on the datasheets for it. (Need to add this!) Thus, you'll have to read through the reviews for the various cameras, but will be able to find units with manual white-balance settings that should work...

-- Dave Etchells (hotnews@imaging-resource.com), February 24, 1999.