$"Fred Anonymous" <anon@anon.com> wrote in message
$news:dvkq58$99t$2$830fa17d@news.demon.co.uk...
$> I've just bought a second-hand EOS350D.
$> The handbook reads as though this camera can be used with flashguns other
$> than the Canon EX series but with limitations.

  Yes; if you use anything other than a Canon EX (or third-party
equivalent, though of course Canon wouldn't recommend that), you
don't get any flash metering.

$> I've tried it with a Canon 300TL with no success at all. The camera does
$not
$> recognise that the flashgun is available.

  As far as communication between the flash and the body, flash units
come in two varieties.  I'm not familiar with the 300TL so I don't
know where it fits in.

  There's the old traditional type in which communication is limited
to the body saying "Fire!" and the flash doing so.  That requires the
big central contact and the rails if it's a shoemount flash, or a PC
cord otherwise.  How much flash output you get is up to the flash; it
may fire at full power, or it may fire at a manually-set partial power
level, or if it has a light sensor, it may figure out on its own how
much power to use.

  And there are flash units which are dedicated to specific makes
or models of cameras, and use additional pins to communicate.  Generally,
these ones work just fine with the cameras for which they're made,
and poorly or not at all with others.  Some of Canon's more recent
non-EX flash units will work with the 350D, albeit without
metering.

  Like I said, I don't know the 300TL.  I see elsewhere on the
net that its feature set is somewhat similar to that of E and
EZ flash units, and some of those work (as fully manual flashes)
on the 350D, but that doesn't guarantee that the 300TL will.

$Best suggestion I can think of is "stick to using what is designed to work
$with it". If you end up fitting something with a high trigger voltage you'll
$be trading your camera for a very expensive paper weight even faster than
$your highest shutter speed.

  The 350D is OK up to a 250V trigger voltage.  Again, I don't
know the 300TL, so I don't know what its voltage is.

------------------------------------------------------------------
    Say hi to my cat -- http://www.stevedunn.ca/photos/toby/

I don't know for sure if that's good advice.

Some sources say the 350 can handle a flash voltage up to 250V, other
sources say 6V. In any event, you don't know what voltage your flash
unit is putting out.

I recently had this same problem and ended up buying a Wein Safe Sync:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=productlist&A=details&Q
=&sku=245292&is=REG&addedTroughType=search

This is guaranteed to work ... whether it's overkill to use the $49 part
when you might be able to get away with a $13 hot-shoe to PC adapter, I
don't know. Your camera, your call.

As far as using non-TTL flash, I think with a digital camera it matters
a whole lot less than with film. Because with digital, you just take a
shot and look at the results right away. You can get the exposure
correct just by looking at a few test shots. It's not like film where
you don't know what you have till you get it back from the lab.