Overcoming pre-flash when using slave flash?

This has been a topic of other threads.

If using slave flashes for studio work, or when trying to boost the power available for cameras with built in flash and no socket/hotshoe, many of you have found that the P-TTL/E-TTL and other pre-flash operations cause the slave to fire the other flashes before required.

Electronically, it must be simple to just count off the slave flash output, and then fire the other flashes after a selected number of preflashes. Is there nothing out there already, that will do this? Alternatively, cannot some bright spark (flash) design an adapter for this purpose.

If there are no takers on this, maybe I'll dust off my electronics knowledge and have a go. Has anybody got some knowledge of the output of a slave flash sensor, and how a flash is normally fired, (thyristor?). What sort of latency can be tolerated between the master flash and the flash trigger? Any help appreciated.

Cheers

Taliety

There's quite a lot of discussion of this on the web, and several products available, both to buy and to make yourself.

http://www.siliconchip.com.au/cms/A_30754/article.html

George