"Aputure" Trigmaster Plus vs. Cactus V5 vs Yongnuo

If you measure the 2.5mm connector on your PC cable, or compare it to the 2.5mm connectors on the other types of cables, is it the same size or is it thinner? When did you buy your triggers?

For the test button thing, I tried taping down the shutter button halfway but this doesn't work that well and it looks like it probably causes the transmitter to drain battery power as long as it's held down in a half press. So that doesn't exactly work too well.

From what I can tell though, a sync port on a camera just goes to a switch inside the camera that's either open or closed. On older mechanical cameras that's all it is. On newer electronic ones the "switch" is a transistor gated circuit (that can be fried if an older flash with some sort of 100V+ trigger voltage tries to blast current throught it). So it seems that it should be possible to just wire a 2.5mm connector to a pushbutton, stick it in the "PC Sync" (the "from camera" rather than "to flash" port), and have your own manual flash triggering button for the transmitter. I can't find any schematics for flash sync circuits so far, so I'm not entirely sure if this is true. So don't just take my word for ir, verify it somehow before doing anything like this.

As for the hot shoe, I've seen adapters for sale for $20/ea which seems too steep. (I could buy new umbrella holding flash brackets for that.) So I ordered this set of 5 annodized aluminum cold shoe adapters from an ebay vendor:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=200686194209

Seems that on eBay these things sell for between $2-3 each. The ones with two nuts on them were only a few cents more (ea) than the lower quality ones with only one smaller nut, so I bought the better ones. I figure that aluminum ought to be sufficient for supporting the rather light flashes I have.

As with anything on ebay though, buy from some vendor that ships from within your own country or you'll be waiting a lot longer for your item, at best.