Please help me select a digital camera with external flash connection for use with studio strobes to photograph small products for insertion on business homepage. Color reproduction is important.

-- Tom Beers (twbeers@connix.com), July 26, 2000

Answers

Most of the newer units have a PC Sync socket or a shoe terminal.

Perhaps the simplest solution would be to use a slave trigger to fire the studio lighting? Depending on the voltage rating of the trigger circuit in the external strobes and the rating of the corresponding pc sync circuit in the camera you could fry a camera. You have to be careful with that sort of thing. Nikon and Oly seem to have a ton of cables, etc. for doing those sort of things. But they(well Nikon, anyhow) seem somewhat vague on just what voltages and what units are safe. If you're really motivated to investigate it try the tech support sections of the websites for the cameras you're interested in.

If the external slave trigger will work, use it! It'll completely isolate the camera from the strobes. Safer, and probably cheaper and less trouble than cabling and adaptors. It won't quench the flashes or strobes though, so power settings and placement will become very important. If you don't want the direct light from the in-camera flash, but still need it to trigger the flashes you can deflect it or use a filter that only passes IR(piece of developed film) to trigger the external slaved units.

One fellow(Pete?) recommended simply taping the slave pickup to the flash on the camera. Which seems to be doable. I'd be careful that not too much of the flash is blocked too close to the flash so that it doesn't overheat.

Good Luck!

-- Gerald M. Payne (gmp@surferz.net), July 26, 2000.

In order to use external flash, you also have to ensure that your camera has a manual exposure mode. Otherwise there is no way to balance the light. YOu probably will also need a good flash meter as well to ensure that you are not overlighting the subject.

-- Jonathan Ratzlaff (jonathanr@clrtech.com), July 27, 2000.