Q and flash

Having spent a few frustrating hours with a multi meter trying to trace a fault in a flash setup, it's in a cable of course, I tried out the Q with the monster AF400T flash. Given that the flash is about eight times the size of the camera, the whole thing handled rather well.

I didn't spot this in the manual, if it is indeed in there, but in order to use a manual flash you need to switch flash to 'off' in the camera's flash menu.

The on board flash, in a small room, worked really quite well with the fisheye showing a totally acceptable amount of vignetting.

Have you checked what the trigger voltage is? Most Pentax flash are low voltage, but not all the old ones are, charge the flash up and measure across the hotshoe contacts with an electronic voltmeter, it may be high voltage that will blow the sync transistor in the Q.

Thanks, I use it all the time and it has worked perfectly well with the *istDS and the K20d

Its 7.7v

I find that Auto is far more accurate than P-TTL.

Glad to hear it Ken, it certainly is some flashgun.

sorry for jumping, i have a metz 44 pentax fit flash, would i be able to mount it on my q without damaging it? thanks

According to Metz the 44 is recommended for Digital Pentax Cameras like the K5 link. I'm thinking, that as the Pentax 540 works on K5 and Q, no reason the Metz should not.

This site list a lot of trigger voltages, unfortunately not the Metz 44

http://www.botzilla.com/photo/strobeVolts.html

It's easy enough to measure using a digital voltmeter, even a cheap one, allow the flash to come to full charge and set the meter to Volts, the +ve (Red) probe goes to the centre hotshoe pin and the -ve goes to the contact within the 'groove' of the hotshoe on the flash.

I would think that any current Metz flash will be fine, I have a Metz 48 AF-1 which has a trigger voltage of just 5Volts which is fine. But it's a simple thing to check.

As Barrie says, the Metz is recommended for use on Pentax digital cameras

The Pentax referred to on some old Metz flashguns would have been the old Spotmatic with just a pair of sync contacts, it didn't matter what the trigger voltage was back then.

But it is true that any modern flash should have a low trigger voltage, but as it's so easy to check with a cheap voltmeter you can pick up for a fiver at most any filling station it's worth doing as a matter of course, I have plenty of old flashguns (Metz included) with trigger voltages in the 100 - 400V range which will blow the sync circuit of most any digital camera to kingdom come. Better safe than sorry is all I'm saying.

The reason why the (usually) -ve contact is in the groove of the hotshoe was so that you couldn't accidentally touch both sync contacts and get a shock.