Hack Your Vivitar 285HV's Proprietary Synch
Vivitar 285HV's aren't perfect. In fact, the new ones' synch voltage is so low (good for your camera) that it sometimes gets hinky with certain slaves and remotes.But then, you can get them for less than $100 and they do have manual adjustment and a synch port. But that synch port is a proprietary one, which means $pecial $ynch cords.
No fear. One of the good things about V285's is that they are quite hackable. And if you know a little basic soldering, you can make that synch outlet pretty much whatever you want.
More info, and links, after the jump.
Neil Creek has a detailed how-to post on how to do just that. (We talked about this briefly in the T-Nut post during HD week.)Couple of important things to remember:
1. Only the new ones are fer-sure safe with your digicams if you hook them up directly. Old ones can fry your camera with a three-digit synch voltage.
2. PLEASE do not mess around with the inside of a flash unless you are comfy with capacitors and how to bleed the potentially widow-making 300 volts out of them.
(See Neil's how-to post.)
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Other Vivitar 285HV goodness:
:: Full Review ::
:: Full-to-1/1024-Power Mod ::
:: T-Nut Light Stand Mount Mod ::
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Posted at 3:10 AM.
9 Comments:
Micro Tool has the $9 replacement feet with standard pc plugs on them, as well.
1/1024 Vivitar Flash Mod: Complete Tutorial. Thought some people might benefit or be interested in this.
I've got one of those replacement feet on my 285HV. The factory foot is quite fragile (mine was already cracked when I bought the flash used). The replacement one is very sturdy and has a proper PC sync jack on it.
You know you could probably do something like that with a lot of different flashes. I was thinking of doing something similar with my sunpaks. See where he has his new wire coming out to a male plug? I was going to do the same thing, but have the wire come out to a 1/4" FEMALE jack!! That way I can plug my 16 channel ebay trigger right in!!
For anyone doing this... Where the wires come out of the foot, put a small zip strap around the wires on the inside of the foot, where they exit. It will keep it safe if it gets tugged on.
I've been thinking about doing this with a female 1/4" jack as well. Has anyone done this?
This video tutorial is very helpful too. http://www.ez1photo.com/resources.html
I got my 285HV yesterday and did the mod 2 hours ago.
It works as intended. Very easy to do. Took 45 minutes for my two flashes.
Thank you VERY much for the tip. It saved my day! :)
mine doesn't work, i checked and double checked
and still nothing
its firing the flash, but not with my transmitors
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