All I've really tested so far is the P-TTL capabilities with the K-3 and
K-5II, and the optical slave functionality, but I haven't really posted
anything so in a while so here it is.
General impression, it's small, really small, for a full featured flash,
in spite of being a bit more than half as powerful as it's larger modern
competitors, it still puts out an amazing amount of light. It makes the
admittedly old tech Pentax AF280T seem well a bit sad, and this using
just two as opposed to four AA cells*.
In a world where third party flash units are more than a bit
"optimistic" in claimed guide numbers the tt350 actually may be telling
the truth.
When I first got the unit and a set of Eneloop Pro batteries I popped
them in to the test the flash functions, as near as I can tell the tt350
cycled in less than 2 seconds from a full power pop, which isn't bad. I
then topped off the batteries, (which took more than four hours so they
were probably on the shelf for quite a while), and repeated the full pop
test, there seemed to be little change in cycle time, it seems to be a
pretty fast little flash.
P-TTL is a bit underexposed, but consistently. I tested the flash with
a number of A F FA and the Sigma 17-70, (which I guess is DA
compatible), and after dialing in a +1 stop correction into the flash
got the same exposure results for each lens with one caveat, the Pentax
A 24mm f2.8 needed the flash manually zoomed to 35mm, after which it
gave the same exposure as the more automatic lenses.
One small niggle is that you have to correct for the change in AOV when
manually changing the zoom position, so 17mm on APS-c is 24mm as far as
the flash is concerned, which is not a problem if you just stick with F
and later lenses.
My large niggle is that it doesn't have a built in exposure sensor so it
doesn't have a useful automatic mode on any camera that doesn't support
P-TTL, and doesn't have any kind of exposure calculator, which is a
shame really, it would make a nice complement to an MX or LX.
Just to reiterate it seems to work just fine on the K-5II so I expect it
will work with all that generation of cameras even though they are not
on the official list.
Well that's it for now. I hope to get some actual photography done with
the thing, real soon now.
*I'm only using the AF280T as a comparison because it's my last
surviving flash unit.
--
Any idiot can shoot with a Canon, Nikon, or Sony, it takes a special kind of
idiot to use a Pentax.
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