Substrobe 150 to digital? Batteries?

[KeysCuda]

My Ikelite Substrobe 150 served me well for many years, over a decade with my Nikonos 5.
Last I knew, it still worked fine. But the battery is dead, and I have not a clue on whether a replacement is available. I suspect I could have one custom built, but no idea on cost, or whether it would be worth it because...

I'm also thinking about this digital UW thing.
I've been shooting topside digital for a while, but I always seem to wind up with a personal pocket camera that doesn't fit in a decent housing (yes, better choices of cameras would be a good start).
And while I regularly use a digital SLR (an older Rebel but its fine for the company's purposes) for business topside, I'm not going to put myself in position of explaining how I flooded the company camera on a personal shoot.

If I could get the 150 strobe working wth a digital system, that could let me spend some money on a camera and housing.
But can it? I asked Ikelite folks at DEMA year or two back and got not much encouragement (OK, none).

Others have told me "there are ways..." but have been kind of vague. Some talk of German converters, or switching it to a slave mode. Or maybe I was hearing them vaguely.

Anyway..anybody done it?

 

[slowhands]

I have no connection with Ikelite other than as a customer. I have a few SS150s that work, and will share the little that I know.

I've asked Ikelite about battery rebuilds, no response. I suspect there is no business case for supporting such an old product. Their current products work very well, and it's probably pointless to support something this old that generates absolutely no revenue. A lot of my dead battery packs are from 1988, way out of support life. The silence from Ikelite folks on this topic speaks for itself.

Physically, it's a little tricky for a non technical person to open up the old battery, but dropping in new batteries is not a problem for a competent electronics tech. You would probably want to use NiCd batteries so that you can use your old charger. If you swap in new batteries, you might get another 10 years out of it. As you know, it's a workhorse. I got a good buy on a batch of D cell NiCd batteries and will renew some of my dead packs with them, just so I can use my old chargers. The newer NiMH batteries have twice the energy storage, but need new chargers. Just be aware of that.

The electronics in the SS150 strobe are too slow to operate in "TTL" mode with most recent DSLRs. You can use them in manual mode only, at either full, 1/2 or 1/4 output, or possibly Slave mode too. The camera must be in manual mode, so that it does not emit "preflashes" which would trigger the 150 too early. You can play around with shutter and aperture settings to get the exposure just right, so manual is not really a crippling limitation. Many prefer it.

So, yeah, with a lot of limitations you can make it work on those housings that are compatible with your Nikonos cord. If you want to use Ikelite housings, you would need a new Ikelite cord, non-TTL type, and you would be limited to manual strobe control as I said.

I think the cost of a new strobe would be small compared to the cost of a decent housing for a newer DSLR, so this might be false economy. Unless you just really like your old strobe, as it seems you do --- in which case, sure, give it a go.

 

[Ikelite Staff]

We no longer offer replacement battery packs for the Substrobe 150. Here's some information from one of my older posts on this issue:

Newer batteries have a much lower internal resistance than the ones we used to use in the Substrobe 400 type battery pack. This combined with higher currents ended up toasting many Substrobe 300's and 400's. However the 150 has a slower recycle time and different oscillator & transformer design, so the newer batteries may work OK with it. Though we never did any formal testing of the newer batteries with those older strobes.

We no longer offer any type of slave sensor or sync cord that is compatible with this strobe and a stock digital housing. There are several threads in this forum on how to modify sync cords to manually trigger one of these non-digital strobe with a DSLR housing. Here's one that discusses use of older non-digital strobes with newer dSLR's:

http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/ik...r-strobes-will-lock-up-new-dslr-bodies-2.html

Regards,
Jean / Ikelite
IKELITE Underwater Systems