BetterPhoto Q&A
Category: Photography Studio Techniques

Photography Question 

Jeff Scheerer
 

Digital Strobe Lighting


I read somewhere a long time ago that if I plug my 1600-volt monolight into a digital camera it will screw up the camera. Is this true?


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June 02, 2005

 

BetterPhoto Member
  Jeff,
The reports are coming in that you can fry your camera if you plug the sync cord directly into the camera. You should get a Safe Sync or equivalent.
Charlie


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June 02, 2005

 

Jeff Scheerer
  what is a safe sync? like a jackrabbit


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June 02, 2005

 

David King
  Jeff, in the "old days" of manual cameras until you put in enough pwer to electrocute yourself or weld the camera parts it really didn't matter. but now with increasingly sensitive electronics in the cameras it is becoming a serious issue. Different strobe use various voltages in their trigger circuits. It has nothing to do with battery size or watt-seconds; it is a function of the capacitor and internal voltage regulation.

Cameras with electronic brains have limited capacity to handle this incoming voltage. Canon is clear that one should not use a trigger voltage higher than 6 volts. So does Olympus. Nikon swears they can handle lots but all of the strobes on their approved list have trigger voltages of 12 volts or less. Hmmmm...

The Safe synch Charlie mentioned is a PC adapter with a buffering voltage regulator in it that will take trigger voltages up to about 400 volts and output only 6 volts or less. THey are good insurance policies costing around $60.00. Other options are radio slaves and even using your pop-up flash to fire the slave unit in the main powerpack or monolight.

David
www.ndavidking.com


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June 07, 2005

 
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