cgardner
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Dear Santa,
Could you and your elves please rethink the paradigm of hot shoe flash and come up with something better? I know this request is too late for this year, but heck if the elves start right away they might pull it off by next year. Here are some design suggestions.... Feel free to add yours....
1) Lose the hot shoe: First its a lousy mechanical connector. It might have been a good idea when flashes where tiny, but nowadays the #1 cause of broken flashes are hot shoe related: the flash slips out, or the stress on the base of the flash at the shoe causes it to break. Secondly, it positions the flash poorly. Lose the shoe, sell a decent flash bracket as part of your camera systems. If you build it they will come....
2) Lose the PC plug: Its an even worse mechanical connector than the hot shoe which loosens with repeated use and is nearly impossible to restore to optimal condition, even with a $20 conditioning tool.
3) Lose the wires, or at least make them optional: Look to the way Apple handles audio on its iMacs. Either an analog phone jack or optical TosLink connector can be plugged into the jack on the back of the computer, which is smart enough to figure out which is in play. Going optical would open new horizons for control and modularity. All the logic for controlling flash could be included in the camera CPUs and simply drive an LED connected to an optical port. Five different mechanical pins shouldn't be needed simply to fire and control a flash in the 21st Century. That's 19th century technology!!!
4) Make control digital, with an open source CODEC, preferably universal. Suggestion #3 makes this possible. Instead of sending coded digital optical signals to the slaves from the flash heads, send them via the modular optical flash interface port. Make the coding sequence open source and sit down with all the players in the camera / flash market and agree to a common, open, interface standard. The model here is the universal remote control for A/V equipment. Each brand has its own coding sequences, but the methodology is the same, allowing one remote to control many different brands and types of equipment.
5) Make control modular: Implementing the above suggestions would make remote triggering by wire, optical or radio trivial. All that would be needed is the appropriate plug in module which would then repeat the the coded digital control signals via wire, fiber optics, visible light pulses, radio waves. But why reinvent the wheel? Most flashes have computers in them already anyway so just add a WiFi card and assign the flash an IP address! That would open up another huge horizon for remote control of flash. If WiFi is used to send images, why can't it control the flashes too?
6) Make dedicated slaves: Hey Canon and Nikon, in case you haven't noticed at least 50% of your flashes are used on light stands, not in the hot shoe. So why are you putting a hot shoe on every flash you sell? Optimize some models as slaves, with an integrated, adjustable mounting bracket compatible with a standard 5/8" light stand stud and remote sensors that will not be hidden by modifiers.
7) Make adapters for legacy equipment: Making all these suggested improvements need not render all legacy hot shoe flashes obsolete. All you need to to is also create hot-shoe>TosLink adapters to bridge the technology gap between your stubborn reliance on 19th century mechanical friction connection for flash which are their weakest link the root cause for all the third-party work arounds...
Please Santa I still believe in you so I know you can make it happen in my lifetime. But I ain't getting any younger ya' know so please kick the elves in the butt and try to get it into the stocking by Christmas 2009, OK?
Chuck
P.S.: Thanks for putting the 50D under the tree early. The cookies and milk will still be there on the 25th.
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