I hate Canon right now... Locked

9VIII wrote:

If Canon was really so confident about removing the pin to save cost because they never expect anyone to use an external flash then they should have just removed the entire Hotshoe.

(In the unlikely scenario where someone ever does remember to use flash, it's going to be the pop-up.)

+1

Yes. That is an option as well.

I personally steered clear of that.

Instead of getting a Nikon Series 1 J1 which had a built-in flash, but no hotshoe, I went with the Pentax Q. Smaller sensor, but a built-in hotshoe.

Not that I used that hotshoe much. LOL. Mostly just to goof around. But at least the Pentax Q had a hotshoe.

The one thing it disabled though, or not implement, is that the hotshoe does not function past a certain shutter speed.

I kinda suspect that that is to force you to get a Pentax flash if you want to flash sync at higher speeds. (I will have to attach my Pentax AF540fgz to my Pentax Q to test that out. LOL.)

But . . . I worked out a workaround for the Pentax Q to flash sync at 1/1000 sec (maybe even 1/1250 sec) with an old dumb (non-TTL) flash unit.

NOTE: The Pentax Q has a really small shutter built into some of its lenses. This allows high speed sync with its own built-in flash, as well as cheap external flashes through the method I outlined in the link below.

On the Pentax Q, I used an optical trigger to trigger off the built-in flash unit.

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/62265544

Problem was, there was no "manual setting" for the built-in flash unit, so the external flash was firing twice. So for the flash that was contributing to the image, it had reduced intensity.

If I was to play around with that set-up more, I would get an optical trigger that could ignore the TTL pre-flash.

When Panasonic lost the hotshoe from the GF line-up, I lost interest in it as well.

I probably would have been ok with getting a GF without the hotshoe, since it had a built-in flash unit. And when I wanted to use a camera with a hotshoe, just use one of my other cameras. But I didn't.

Take care & Happy Shooting!