Does Sony HVL-60M overheat?
I’m keen a99 shooter and I love my camera. I do lots of low-light-fast-movement performance shooting and my camera does excellent job. I never use flash, but one has to keep it in the bag. As there is no 3.-rd party flash units for new a99 ISO shoe, only Sony flagship HVL-60M left to my shopping list. Still, forums repeadetly warned about overheating. I decided to test that.
Yesterday I got HVL-60M from local Sony Concept Store for 3 days testing. These are my initial observations.
Summary: does it overheat?
Answer is Yes and No. If you really provoke it, then it does. Turn power to 1/1 and it overheats in 24 shots or so. Holy crap, you might think. No. In regular TTL use I was not able to overheat it.
How did I test
I charged my Panasonic 2100 mAh AA Li-Ion batteries. They were pretty warm, when I installed them into the flast unit, but this is real-world scenario.
I mounted flash to my a99, turned both to Manual. I selected 1/1 flash power from HVL-60M menu and started to take heavily overexposed photos:
Flash recovery is painful 5 seconds (or so) in 1/1 mode. But keep in mind, that it’s a powerful flash, with guide number 60. In real world you rarely or never need full power. After 24.-th shot, overheating icon appeared to LCD.
So, I waited 5-7 minutes or so, until flash cooled down and overheating sign disappeared.
In the second part I switched HVL-60M into TTL mode, letting flash determine power needed and started to shoot in Drive/Hi mode. HVL-60M did’t skip any single frame. Then I switched camera over to super-hi-speed 10 FPS drive mode, so called Tele-zoom Cont. Priority AE. Again, flash kept up with the pace. I shot 250 shots like that and got bored. There was no overheating whatsoever.
Tomorrow I take my camera/flash to outdoor photo-shoot and write about it.
- techandgadgets posted this