Ikelite housing and Epoque strobes

[Kolmer]

Hi All.
I’ve just bought a second hand housing Ikelite 6144 for my Canon Powershot Pro 1 and I need to know what sync cord do I need to connect it to my strobes Epoque ES-150 DS and ES-230DS? Did anyone use that setup before? I’m new to underwater photography; can you recommend some website where I can find some info and guidelines on how to get the most of my both strobes?

Thank You for all your future help.
Regards

 

[John Gulliver]

I'm no expert on Epoque strobes but do know that few people use them with DSLR set-ups, partly because of their relatively flimsy build compared to Ikelite, Sea & Sea etc, although they are quite popular among compact camera users. It might be a good idea to sell yours and buy a couple of used Ikelite strobes. With an Ikelite-to-Ikelite dual sync cable, you will then have TTL, provided the strobes are TTL compatible (serial numbers higher than 70000 for the DS50, higher than 5000 for the DS125).

 

[slowhands]

The internal flash is blocked by the rather large lens port, so you can't use it at all. To use your Epoque strobes, you would probably need to run a fiber optic cable to each of them using whatever fiber optic cables they recommend. I don't know how well those Epoque strobes can follow the Canon preflash sequence, so you might have to operate them in manual mode. That's probably the easiest solution. The more recent strobes from Inon or Sea&Sea have a better chance of working with the preflash.

That is an older housing and camera from 2004. Ikelite either did not put a Canon CTTL converter in the housing, or it did not work very well -- I'm not sure which, but I suspect they were still working out the bugs and it did not have a CTTL converter.

Either way, Ikelite recommends that any wired strobe you use, even Ikelite, should be operated in Manual mode. In fact, Ikelite recommended using their Manual controller for all their strobes on this particular housing.

Another option would be to find an old Ikelite Canon TTL converter to connect to some Ikelite DS strobes. I don't know if the TTL converter works with this particular camera though. Canon's flash protocol is challenging to decipher.