AF 360 FGZ flash wireless with K100D?

[oceans]

I can't find setting that will work to use this flash wireless with the K100D. I can use it with the istD, as that camera has a setting for it in the custom functions. Does anyone know how to set it up to function with the K100D, or if it will even work in wireless mode?

[mattdm]

I can't find setting that will work to use this flash wireless with the K100D. I can use it with the istD, as that camera has a setting for it in the custom functions. Does anyone know how to set it up to function with the K100D, or if it will even work in wireless mode?

I think that's one of the things arbitrarily cut from the K100D (and presumably the K200D) in order to differentiate between that and the more-upmarket K10D/K20D.

[ihbryant]

Yup, they left that off of the K100D :(. If you have two of the wireless Pentax flashes, you can use one to control the other. The camera won't do it by itself, though.

[thekevinmonster]

You cannot use the K100D's built-in flash to trigger a slave flash. Well, you can, but you will have a problem: the flash fires twice, once when the mirror goes up and once when the actual shutter opens.

You can see this by putting the camera on the short timer setting (2s?) where it will flip the mirror up to prevent mirror slap from wobbling the camera while it is on a tripod. The flash will pop once when the mirror goes up, so the exposure sensor can figure out what exposure, and then a second time when the shutter opens.

This will end up triggering your external flash twice, which might result in it going off only once if it can't recycle fast enough.

[mattdm]

You cannot use the K100D's built-in flash to trigger a slave flash. Well, you can, but you will have a problem: the flash fires twice, once when the mirror goes up and once when the actual shutter opens.


This is the case with cheap optical-trigger slaves, but Pentax also has a more sophisticated optical wireless flash system which actually uses information encoded in the preflash to tell the slave units what to do.

As noted above, the K100D's built-in flash can't send these signals, but the K10D's can. (Presumably the same with the K200D and K20D.) You can also mount a Pentax hotshoe flash or Sigma EF5x0DG Super, or Metz 58 (not 48, though) AF-1 as a controller.