Definitive Pentax Flash Guide

[mattdm]

My Pentax flash guide:

Pentax P-TTL Hot Shoe Flash Comparison (http://pttl.mattdm.org/)

is complete. If you're looking to buy a P-TTL flash, this should help you decide among all of the options — and there turn out to be quite a few.

Let me know if there's any corrections or additional information. Thanks!

[abarr]

...does anyone know if you can use an older strobe (vivitar) with the K10d? Why get rid of something that works great...!

[mattdm]

...does anyone know if you can use an older strobe (vivitar) with the K10d?

Maybe. It depends on the amount of voltage the flash puts through the camera when it triggers — on many old flashes, this is very high, sometimes hundreds of volts. It's not known what exactly the K10D will take — all Pentax will say is "Any Pentax flash is okay". The safe answer may be as low as 7V.

There's a list of measured flash voltages here:
http://www.botzilla.com/photo/strobeVolts.html
but be aware that some flash models were made for a long time and some copies of a given model may be safe while older ones may not.


Why get rid of something that works great...!

Even if the flash voltage isn't safe, there are adapters which will protect your camera, so you definitely could keep using it.

The newer flashes do have other nice features that many of the older models don't have. That may or may not be important to you depending on what you want to do.