I recently purchased a 420EX from B and H. I works perfect except that when I press the pilot light to send out a test flash the light directly to the right of it NEVER lights up. Is my flash broken or am I doing something wrong?

-- shadowman (mshadow818@msn.com), February 09, 2002

Answers

What light never lights up?

Don't expect the "good exposure" light to work when you open flash an ETTL or TTL flash system, since open flash is essentially a manual operation.

If everything else works when you take photos, and your slides (which should be used to test exposure) are well exposed, I would not worry about this.

-- kenneth katz (socks@bestweb.net), February 09, 2002.

Don't worry - there's nothing wrong with your flash.

The light immediately to the right of the pilot light/button is the exposure confirmation light. It will only light up when you actually take a picture. Its purpose is to tell you when a photo taken with flash will be adequately exposed. If it doesn't light up, then it means the picture may be underexposed.

This is covered in the 420X instruction manual (not sure what page, though).

Nik

-- NikB (ndb_letters@yahoo.com), February 10, 2002.

Thanks, you guys were guys were right, it lit up when I actually took the picture. My old piece of junk flash had the same setup but it was a thyrister (don't think I spelled that right) flash and thus didn't need to even be attached to the camera for the light go on. Thanks for the reasurence though, I almost sent it back defective!

-- shadowman (mshadow818@msn.com), February 11, 2002.