Fiber TTL and Ikelite’s recent Sony housings

[Craine]

Hey all,

Hoping someone can point me in the right direction. I’m looking at a new Ikelite housing, either for an A7 IV or an a6700, but neither of those have fiber ports built into them. I’m not interested in switching to any strobe that is electrically fired, so I’m trying to figure out how I would get fiber ports on these housings. 
 

Ikelite does make this Manual Fiber Optic Transmitter for DL and DLM Housings, but that is manual only with their (additional cost) hot shoe. 
 

Does anyone have a suggestion for a similar bulkhead that just allows an LED trigger (like the s-Turtle or UWTechnics) to be used?

[Chris Ross]

Ikelite is not really setup for fibre optic triggering their wired TTL system is their "thing".   The only reliable way to do it would do it would be to find an optical bulkhead  -something like this:

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4455817

 

I know that UW technics will provide a optical bulkhead something like the link above for the Sea Frogs housings, however unlikely to fit an Ikelite housing as they use imperial threads while the rest of the world is metric.

 

I do see they offer a TTL optical bulkhead for Canon only, maybe a Sony one is might appear?  Note though they only talk about fibre optic triggering of Ikelite strobes so you would need to confirm it would work with any other strobes.

 

You best bet would be to contact Pavel to see if he can provide a suitable bulkhead for Ikelite. 

[dhaas]

A friend and good photographer uses his Nikon Z6 in his Ikelite housing and installed that manual fiber optic port.  Easy to switch out and he says he gets long life from the pair of 2032 batteries.

 

He uses Ikelite DS160 strobes with the optical cord "receivers" plugged in each DS160 strobe. He has used a manually set AOI Q1 strobe plus an Inon S2000 unit successfully.

 

Perhaps order the manual optical cord bulkhead as an add on keeping the hot shoe / Ikelite's corded bulkhead if you ever sell the housing in the future.

 

The fiber optic hot shoe is just a trigger and ground pins  and works with other brand strobes but you'd need to set manual flash output.

 

DH

 

PS - I'm not sure if Ikelite is working on a TTL optical bulkhead like they developed for Canon. If so it will likely work with Ikelite strobes in TTL only as the Canon version does. 

Edited August 26 by dhaas