Sea & Sea YS-03 TTL?

[Ministryofgiraffes]

Yeah. Pavel is a legend. He sent me a souped up board to try and fix my Z7 issue... lamentably it still couldn’t rectify the problem... hoping everything will work with retra. flashes//

 

[Interceptor121]

Back from memory from my RX100 days
Make sure you have the following off
Red eye correction -> gives an additonal pre-flash that fools the strobe
AF illuminator -> makes the camera fail the reading of pre-flash typically on one side of the fiber plugs as lights reverberates inside the housing

Shutter speed does not matter but 1/1600 is very low try something normal like 1/60 or 1/100

 

[Chris Ross]

Trying to assist remotely is always difficult as you are never sure about other parameters. Just to confirm with your shot at f2 and 1/250 that is over exposed - Have you confirmed the ambient exposure at that setting? - for example in full daylight 1/250 @ f2 ISO 100 would be be well over exposed. What ISO are you using?

Take the 1/250 @ f2 photo with flash and without flash - to see what the flash is doing clearly, the ambient light shot should be quite dark. Your subject should be about 300mm away - similar to what you might shoot when underwater and should mostly fill the frame and the camera should not move between frames - you don't want to confuse issues by the camera changing flash exposure between shots, it will base the exposure off what it meters in the frame and if the subject moves it might change the exposure. If the exposure is dark on the ambient f2 shot and over exposed on the flash shot - this is saying TTL is not working. But need to confirm the ISO for example ISO1600 and f2 may be below the minimum turn down for the flash.​

The next question what is the recycle time like? - when a flash dumps at full power you can normally tell just listening to it; if it sounds the same at f2 and f11 it may be that it is dumping at full power - this is a failure mode I recall seeing reported a number of times. If this is the case then taking shots at f2 / 2.8 / 5.6 / 8 / 11 should get progressively darker. The other check if the f11 shot - if that is properly exposed then see if it responds to flash exposure compensation.

 

[Lafaye]

Thanks for all the suggestions. We have been working through them, and it seems that the strobe is adjusting MOST of the time. At 1/250, inside with normal room lighting, with the subject closer to filling the frame, exposures are about the same for f stops below 5.0 and above 7.1; however, between 5.0 and 7.1, we are consistently getting way too much light. Randomly, shots at other f stops are also over-exposed. I also wondered about the fiber optic cables. I tried the same series with the cable that came with the camera and also with a backup cable that I ordered with similar results, but my daughter noticed that the backup cable says “217 cores” and the Sea & Sea cables are 613 cores.