BetterPhoto Q&A
Category: New Questions

Buying a flash

(1) is it a good investment in its own right for the future (or are models quickly superceded?), even if it will be used infrequently?

(2) I was thinking about buying either the 220EX Speedlight or the 420EX Speedlight. I understand the 420 is about twice the cost; does anyone have experince about how the two compare in performance? (in outdoors situations, when would the 420 noticeable offer improvements over the 220?)

(3) The advantage of buying in the Canon brand was for TTL, A-TTL and now E-TTL. For the non-professional photographer (and somebody like me who is still getting to grips with the terminology), what noticeable differences do these features make to the final picture/colour etc? Can anyone recoomend an alternative to the Canon range or should I stick with them?

Many thanks for any advice, Will 20/05//01.

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May 20, 2001

I'm in Australia too, and I use a Canon Eos 5, and coupled it with a Speedlight 540 EZ. Unfortunately, having an older model, I cannot use E-TTL, but hey, the 5 was going cheap :)

In answer to your question, no, it's not a good investment for what you require - No flash will make an appreciable difference to landscape photos. And as for night wildlife photography - have a care for the animals you photograph. A normal torch is extremely painful for a possum, so imagine what a flash will do to it. Possible permanent retina burn? I'll have to ask my vet friend.

2) Chop off the last digit and that's the guide number of the flash. So a 220 has a guide number of 22, slightly more than half that of the 420 at 42. What does a guide number mean? 22GN means that on a f/1.0 lens, on ISO 100 film, your flash will be effective to 22 meters. On a f/5.6 lens, (Your lens fully telescoped) it would be 22/5.6 or roughly 4M. The 420 would reach 7.5m. Starting to look more value for money?

3) For the non-professional photographer, E-TTL is the ants pants of flash photography. It stands for Evaluative through the lens metering, which means that the flash decides how powerful it needs to fire, by measuring natural light, then firing a preflash, to see how much of it bounces back (effectively range finding). This means that it's next to impossible to get over exposed photos. or underexposed, (Unless the subject is too far out of range)

Personally, I'm going to stick with Canon, if only for the reason that I am very happy with their range of equipment. Sure, they say Nikon has a better flash system, better optics, but Canon is good enough for me in those respects, and features vs price, I much prefer the Canon.

Cheers,

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May 20, 2001