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 ::