Ikelite SLR-AF and Substrobe

[b1gcountry]

Hey,
I've been monkeying around with a small canon P&S in a Canon UW Housing. A friend at work recently (5 hours ago) gave me his old SLR housing and Strobe. The Housing is a "Ikelite SLR-AF Case" with a "Ikelite Substrobe". He kept the camera, but it was an Olympus 5000 IIRC.

This case and strobe are circa 1988, and I was wondering exactly which cameras are compatible with this Housing and Strobe. The documentation is rather sparse, but it appears that the case is compatible with a wide variety of SLRs (at least at the time). Does anyone have expereince with this model housing or strobe? I'm not even sure if the Strobe still works. It has not been used in a dozen years, is there any service I should look into before trying to use this case and strobe? I have an original Canon EOS that I will be trying to put in there tonight, and see what happens.

Anything else I should know? Anyone ever heard of this case? I tried the search, but didn't find anything relevent.

Tom

 

[alcina]

You might need to contact Ikelite or your local Ikelite dealer - they should be able to dig up a list of any cameras that were actually meant to go in the housing.

You might be able to DIY stuff and have your own gear work - remember to make sure you have the ports and any zoom rings on to make sure everything works. Good luck and report back!

 

[EastEndDiver]

The older Ikelite SLR housings were sometimes good for several different cameras.Back in the "old days" you could send your Ikelite housing to them and they would reconfigure the controls for the camera you wanted to change to .I did this twice with an Ikelite housing in the early 80's.I think they chareges around $100.00 for this service.Thats was back then.

Call Ikelite i am sure they can help you out.If you need the number just look up their website it is on .They are located in Indianna.

 

[MarkH]

Most of the old "pre-AF" housings were basically the same housing with slightly different control rod positions. I used one of those with around 5 different manual SLR bodies. I'm not positive, but the AF series all seem to be very similar as well, with slightly different control rod configurations again (as the above poster mentioned). I'm using a 1980's Ikelite AF housing now with my digital Rebel XT. The housing was originally designed for a Minolta or Olympus (I forget which) film SLR. Many SLRs have more or less the same physical format (eg: tripod mount in the middle centered with the lens, shutter release on the right top side, focusing ring on the lens barrel, etc.). As long as the camera is not too large to fit in the housing, matching up the basic control rods is fairly easy with a bit of bending.

 

[b1gcountry]

So I bring it home after work and start putzing around with it. The Ikelite Strobe was a "Substrobe MV" TTL strobe. The back has a small light, a screw knob hatch for the batteries, and a selector Switch TTT-Off-Manual. There is some gunk around the hatch. I opened it up with a screwdriver because it was on so tight, and there are still batteries in there, but they are leaking and corroding. The hatch cover is cracked, and the contacts inside are corroded. I figure its toast, but I ditch the batteries, and clean it up. The battery compartment seems pretty well sealed, so I flush it out with fresh water, and it isn't looking too bad now. I put in some new AAs, and screw in the cover, and I start to hear capacitors charging. I connect the cord, and short two contacts as it says to in the manual. Pop. Flash goes off. I do it again. Same thing. I turned the switch to the off position, and short the wires, and Pop Again. I'm surprised the thing actually works, but it seems like the selector switch may be broken.

The Sync cord is a five conductor type with a hotshoe connector inside the case. This hotshoe did not want to connect with my Canon EOS camera. Do different brands use different hotshoes on their SLR Bodies? I have only ever worked with a Canon...

Also, do they make fiber optic sync cords that will connect to this type of strobe so I can use it with my compact digital housing?

The rest of the stuff was pretty cool. The Housing and two Ports were in there. Also had all the O-Rings and a viewfinder adapter. The Tray for the camera did not fit my Canon camera. The Tripod Mount was not lined up with the screw in the tray. Also none of the arms hit the right places to trigger the shutter, etc.

I think I might look into getting a camera that will work with this housing and just trying to figure that out for awhile. The housing has a Zoom Ring inside it. The manual also mentioned capabilities for an aperture/focus ring, but I'm not sure how that works. Once I cleaned the salt off everything, it doesn't look too bad. I will miss the instant review if I go from digital back to film, but the shutter lag and lack of close focus ability is starting to be a real pain with my little camera when using it underwater...A lot of fish tails and cut off heads...a bunch of blurry Nudibranches too.

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

Tom

 

[MarkH]

That 5-pin cord and hotshoe adaptor sounds like the TTL sync system for whatever camera was supposed to be in there. The TTL arrangement for different cameras is different. If you look at the hotshoe mounts of various TTL SLRs, the arrangements of the contacts is different. The hotshoes should all be the same physical size though. Mine came with the same thing, but it was useless for the TTL on my Rebel XT (and my strobe didn't have the TTL 5-Pin cord) so I replaced the cord socket on the housing with one of my old 3-pin non-TTL Ikelite sockets. For your camera with no hotshoe or PC cord socket, you might want to get a "peanut slave". They cost around $20 up here. You attach it to the hotshoe adapter in the housing and the flash on your camera triggers it to flash the strobe. You have to put something over the on-camera flash to prevent the light from going out through the housing and ruining your shot, but not blocking the light to the peanut slave if that makes any sense. It's a similar concept to most underwater point and shoot housings when you're using a strobe with a fiber optic sync cord. As for the substrobe, I had a substrobe M, which didn't have a sealed battery compartment so you might want to double-check with the MV. I had the same problem with cracking when I tightened it down. I didn't use much force, but the cheap plastic wasn't designed to take much and it cracked (barely visible) and flooded.

 

[EastEndDiver]

The only problem using a Sub-Strobe for a digital camera is that is will NOT compensate for the Pre-Flash of the camera unless the camera has the capability of turning off the pre-flash.You can get a fiber optic synch cord.

 

[b1gcountry]

My hot shoe adapter would not even fit on my Canon EOS Rebel's hotshoe. It was a close fit, but the camera had sort of a sloped surface, and it went on halfway and got jammed. I almost didn't get it off.

My current housing in a Canon Brand and it does not have any means for attatching a hot-shoe adapter. These Peanut Slaves are not waterproof, are they? My small Canon does have full flash control, although I would guess I would not have great control over the flash output if I went this route...the fiber optic slave would trigger the strobe, but no way to control how much light it dumps...

I really don't know if the battery compartment was waterproof or not, but it had a lot of battery residue inside. I figured even if it got a little fresh water inside, it would be better than the battery gunk. I'm guessing the brooken door caused the strobe to flood and mess up the batteries.

Tom

 

[MarkH]

The hotshoes aren't waterproof. They're designed to go on the hotshoe mount of surface flashes.