Slightly odd flashgun question

divamum

So. Was going through my old 35mm gear bag, and came across an old bounce hotshoe flash I bought - secondhand! - back in the UK 12 years ago or more. It's a store's in-house brand (Miranda C-AF 32, for any Brits reading the board - that was Dixons brand, if memory serves), designed as a 3rd-party dedicated TTL flash specifically for Canon autofocus cameras (I had a 1000FN at the time). It has a bounce-zoom head and an ISO adjustment slider, but other than that is pretty basic, I think.

I stuck it on my Rebel XT just to see what would happen, not expecting it even to switch on... I was surprised when it fired up perfectly, to be honest! And even more so when at first, it actually worked quite well, but only when I set the camera to manual and used a shutter speed of 1/60. Then, it decided to work "sometimes". I have no idea if it's due to the settings I gave it, that it's simply an old, knackered unitl (which wasn't that good to begin with), or if it just doesn't talk to a digital camera very well! I never really used it that much with the 1000FN, so it's not like it's a familiar piece of equipment to me; it's really just been hanging around all this time.

Anything I can try to see if I can get it to work properly with the Rebel XT? There's no symbol or anything on the display to indicate it "knows" there's a flash there, and it wouldn't fire it in any of hte program modes. It may just be dead and it's no big deal, but since I have it, until I can buy myself a decent, more modern flash, it would be kind of cool to play aroound with it. (Or what else can one use an old, dead flash for?!)

Thanks for any ideas!







(note to self: dust it in daylight, not a darkened office! Whoops... I sweaer it looked clean before I used the Elph to snap a shot!)

ziggy53

Be very careful using an old flash unit with digital cameras. The trigger voltage may be dangerously high and can damage your camera.

Check here to see if your unit is listed:

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

Here are instructions to test the unit for yourself:

http://www.botzilla.com/photo/g1strobe.html

divamum

THANK you for that. Geez, never even occurred to me there might be a current issue since this one was designed for an autofocus (thus in my mind "electronic") camera.

It doesn't appear on any of those lists, but sounds like perhaps I should just give it a quiet burial (or is there some other way to use it, ie off camera or something?)

Thanks for the tip. Now here's hoping I haven't unwittingly bricked my camera.....

Edited to add: no damage appears to have been done - just tested the camera and it's working normally, so as long as it does'nt engender some kind of creeping crud, we're ok.... ~~~phew~~~

Edited again to add: and BOY do I feel like a dumb*** (even though I DID google for info before I stuck it on the camera, I used the model number instead of just the brand so nothing sinister came up). Never, never NEVER make any assumptions with digital recording or sound equipment. Duh.