K20D Curious behaviour

I had a big studio shoot on Wednesday - 23 portraits in one day!

I discovered when I pointed the camera at a light the viewfinder display got brighter, I didn't know it did that - handy.

However two unconnected odd things happened. I use Bowens flash heads with a cheap but reliable wireless trigger and the camera on 'X', I noticed that I had black banding on the edge of a couple of shots so either the flash was firing late or the shutter had gone faster than 1/180th but which?

I have the camera set to use the battery in the grip first, when it depleted I swiched off and on again to use the battery in the body. Two shots later I get the 'battery depleted' message and I assume the one in the body was flat too but it wasn't. Do the switch on/off routine again but after two shots same again. Both times the ISO changed from 100 to 800.

Took both batteries out and the problem went away but it is strange.

Ken,

Off-chance, checked the battery connectors to ensure they are in place and clean? If they were dodgy, you may not have had the right voltage supplied to your gear? Either that or one of your batteries may be faulty / on the way out?

I have the same problem with my "cheap" Chinese wireless triggers. Some "cheap" wireless triggers do induce some lag before triggering the flash, so you must bring your shutter speed down to 1/125 sec. to have sync.

I've had them for five years and they work flawlessly with everything except Bowens and then only 3 shots out of 140 have fired late, very odd.

One of my K10D's used to do that when told to use grip battery first, it would totally ignore the battery in the camera if the grip was attached. I had to go into the menu and manually change the camera battery setting to body otherwise it would keep trying to use the one in the grip.

Sounds like the Cactus v4 problem i had, it worked with all the other flashes including in the store but it didn't want to work with the AF540FGZ i have
It did fire though every single time but far too late.

It was the trigger that couldn't deliver the right voltage to trigger the flash, there are some modifications you could do to fix that.

Maybe you're havning the same problems?

I dont think that can be it, with studio flashes its surely just a simple switch without any trigger voltages being involved.