hard wired vs. fiber optic for true TTL

[strap-hanger]

can someone tell me if you can get ttl by using FO? i thought to get ttl you had to use hard wired strobes to you hot shoe? if ttl can be acheived with FO then what are the best strobes for this?
i
i used to have a 5050 with ys-90s and would get furstrated with the FO, i would sometimes miss shots b/c the strobes would fire fist, long or not at all'. i also hated having to set the setting on the strobes every time i took a shot.


it seems kike the dslr housing allow you to control the strobes througn the housing instead of reaching uop to each strobe and changing the setting or you could allow the ttl to do its thing. how can i achive this with p&s setup?

 

[Ardy]

Hi I have changed from hard wired to FO in the last 3 years and I would not go back. The convenience of being able to repair a broken cable in 5 mins for $0.50c v a $100 cable which you never have with you and it took 1 hour and risked the water proofing of the flash.

TTL or manual the only way to go is FO.

I have a SnS 110a (good strobe) and a Inon Z240 both work well and consistently with FO.

BTW I dived for the first 18 months with an old SnS YS 50 manual strobe with my SnS 110a and never had a problem with getting it to fire (manual only). You must line up the cable to the strobes slave sensor, I did that by gluing a small attachment that I drilled a small hole through the size of the FO cable. You must also have the strobe in slave mode but I guess you know that.

 

[bvanant]

Technically with FO you are getting an emulation of TTL i.e. the camera flash fires a test pulse and that gets sent to the strobe. The camera senses the returned light and sets the camera flash to the correct power. The camera flash fires the correct power that gets sent over FO to the strobe that then sends out the correct power. In my hands, the Inon and S&S strobes are all quite good with FO TTL emulation over a wide range of strobe powers and scene illumination for the macro-y things I shoot. In a brightly lit (sun ball) type wide angle scene TTL is a bit more tricky but you can get good results.
With DSLR cameras and electrical sync cords, you still get TTL emulation via a TTL converter either in the housing or in an external converter (Heinrich Weikamp etc). To get real ETTL (Canon) or ITTL (Nikon) you need to use a housed strobe i.e. a Canon or Nikon strobe (there are others) in a housing.

Bill