A80 u/w housing can add strobe?

[Diablo]

or must buy those ikelite one then can?

[Gildow]

Hi!

Of course you can add a strobe. there are quite a few digital strobe that will be able to handle that....to name a few :-

Inon (D180/Z220, etc)
SunPak
Sea&Sea
Ikelite (DS125/DS50 with Wireless sensor)

these are kind of synced using Optical Cable. meaning to say that the strobe watches your camera's internal strobe and fires at the same time. Of course you will have to do manual power adjustment.

On the other, I would advice you to invest in something that has a hard wire connection as well so at least you will have some kind of upgrade path.

one bad thing about using Optical Cable is that your camera internal strobe will still have to fire which means ur camera will use more power as compared to those hard wired one.

Hope this help...maybe someone can add in more ?

[Diablo]

meaning the external strobe is like a slave unit?

wouldnt that defeat the purpose, since the shutters would have close by the time the strobe triggers off?

[kng]

Originally Posted by Diablo meaning the external strobe is like a slave unit? wouldnt that defeat the purpose, since the shutters would have close by the time the strobe triggers off?

Yes, it IS a slave unit but is fast enough so that the strobe fires in sync with the shutter. With systems that use the fiber optic cable, you have to manually adjust the strobe power. Can be a bit tricky.

You generally cannot use a 'non-digital' strobe cos a digicam's internal flash emits a "pre-flash" and the strobe has to ignore this and only fire upon the 2nd "actual" flash.

[DTan]

why do digicams have preflashing and actual flash?
say for example i somehow can omit the preflashing, that doesn't mean the non-digital strobe can be used right?

[waisj]

Originally Posted by DTan why do digicams have preflashing and actual flash? say for example i somehow can omit the preflashing, that doesn't mean the non-digital strobe can be used right?

Digicams uses the preflash to determine/calculate the flash exposure prior to the main flash of which the shutter opens and exposure begins.

YS 90's are/were non digital strobes actually the only difference with the series are that the 90DX's have a build in circuitry to omit the main flash from firing whilst the pre-flash of digicams are fired.

you are also right, if pre-flash can be disabled, you can use pre-digital strobes. You will still need optical fibre cables though to trigger the flash( sea and sea) generally speaking.