YS-01 and Low Flash Power Settings

[KevinG58]

I don't see many replies here but I'll try anyway. I've been pretty happy with my pair of YS-01 strobes for three or four years, except they will not trigger when flash power on my Olympus E-PL1 and now my E-PL5, are set to anything less than full power.

By both Oly manuals I should be able to conserve camera battery power by turning the flash power down, and still trigger the strobes. The recommendation was 1/64th. I can get intermittent firing on the E-PL5 only at 1/3rd power set. The E-PL1 will not fire strobes at anything but full power (I've fired stobes in RC mode on it but lose ability to turn power down in RC.)

Last year I changed out one of my fiber optic cables when it suddenly stopped firing either strobe (I swapped cables to test), even though I could see it still conducted light.

Are the YS-01s just sensitive about the amount of light it takes for them to fire? Or am I missing soemthing really simple?

And if it matters, I use rarely use TTL. 99% of the time I am in Manual on the camera & strobes.

Thanks in advance.

 

[DazedAndConfuzed]

That should not be the case, since in TTL mode, pre-flash bursts are so short that they are much much less than full power. In my setup, I have one preset mode on my camera where I shoot the strobes in manual, and the camera's slave strobe setting is set 1 on a scale of 1 to 10 in order to extend the life of the battery.

Are you plugging the fiber optic plug into the wrong hole? Looking from the front, the left one is the input from the camera and the right one is the output (for daisy chaining strobes)