First play off camera flashguns - what am I doing wrong?

Sorry Stefan,

I've not had any problems yet.

The set I bought worked straight out of the box at 1/180. The only problems I had was user error, firstly from not pushing the tx unit far enough on to the hot shoe when I first tried it and secondly wondering why it wouldn't fire when I put the shutter speed above 1/180 (DOH).

The only other thing I could suggest to completely identify the tx unit as faulty is try it on another camera, if you still have the same probs then its definately the unit. But to be honest, I wouldn't want a suspect unit, I would just go and change it, take your camera with you and test the new on in the shop so you can be 100% sure its ok.

In my experience electronic things either work 100% first time or they never work 100%

Hope you get it resolved

Regards
PaulM

Though luck with Elinchrom, if tehy werent that expensive they could get away with it but now...

When the cactus v4 of my work it does sync down to 1/180 without a problem but when it doesn't work 1/15, it does however fire everytime, I must give them that

It seems it's quite an isolated problem, just a bad product so hopefully some new ones will solve it.

Thank you Paul, good to see they work great for you.

I can try it out on the KX a Tuesday so will do that, but like you said I don't trust them anymore and I've reports of other K10D users that they work correctly for them so will get some new ones.

And yes will take my camera with me to show them the problem and so that I can test the new ones.


btw, The problem does seem to be the temperature.
Here in the computer room it is slightly warmer and they work perfectly here but in the living room where it's 19 degrees Celsius, (I think two degrees colder) they don't work.

19 degrees is just such a high temperature that it is really silly, so can't except that... will make sure they are cold when I try them in the shop or else they might work

Stefan did you get this sorted out ?

James

No, James, not yet.
I've giving up on the units I have and i won't do anything with them since they are new and don't want to break them when trying to fix them since then my warranty would be broken.

I'm now using the pop-up flash to trigger the flash so not all is lost at the moment.

Will go to the shop a wednesday since it's quite a drive a way but the shop I near my moms place so will do two things at once

Well I went to the shop today.
Service was good and they where helpfull but still there is the problem.

We did some test in the shop and it seems the flash (pentax af540fgz) is the problem, other flashes in the shop worked without a problem up to 1/180.
It seems that if the batteries are cold that the trigger voltage isn't high enough so will try some other batteries in the trigger to see what works, or do someone has some other ideas?

It works on 2 AAA batteries so 3v.

opinion: trigger voltage is not high enough. You won't get it to work reliably, I think.

Bret

Bret, I think so too.

If the batteries are warm then it does work so only thiny bit more powerfull batteries or ones that work better in the cold should do the trick.

Lithiums?

Dan

Yes I could try that, there are now alkaline inside.
Maybe the resitance in the battery might be at fault since it does trigger the flash but too late... maybe Nimh will work although the voltage is lower... but then again how much power is needed to trigger a flash

Will try the Lithiums Dan