A while back I guess in august or something, one fine day the flash on my Sony a200 stopped working completely. I don’t know if it was my negligence, wrong handling or some twist of fate. I tried a million settings, but it just wouldn’t work. As a DSLR owner I really got worried. After asking a friend, took it to a repair guy who suggested I go to the Sony service center. Firstly, service centers are huge revenue generators for camera companies. Most of them are not there to help you, there are there to make a quick buck. To make matters worse the warranty on my camera was long over. Bingo.
An instance- a friend of mine got a Canon 1000D and the flash was gone exactly the same day he bought the camera. According to him, even though it was under warranty, telling some bizarre reasons the Canon service center people charged him a little over INR 10,000 (Approximately $200) which is ridiculous. I didn’t want to fall for such a scam.
I took it to the Sony service center and they kept the camera with them for a couple days and then called me to say that the repair will cost INR 5,700 (Approximately $103) which I didn’t have and I opted out. So since they knew they weren’t getting anything from me, they charged me INR 300 ($6) as ‘inspection charges’. They didn’t even touch the camera, gave it to me as it is and charged me 300 bucks. Thank you Sony.
The camera repair guy put up his hands since he didn’t have the Sony chip and asked me to wait till it arrived. As on date, it didn’t. That was like almost two months ago. I really started wondering if I have any hope for the camera.
Fortunately, there is. The thing is I really don’t need a built-in flash for the camera. For fashion shoots and portraits I wouldn’t really need a camera flash at all. All I need is a trigger and external lights. There is no use of camera flash when doing professional work and it is ridiculously insufficient for the rigors of every studio activity.
It’s slightly complicated though. Sony’s hot shoe mount is different from Nikon and Canon. It’s too proprietary. There is a hot shoe adapter made by Sony which will facilitate third part flash mounting on a Sony DSLR, but it costs INR 7999 ($145). Luckily there are third party hot shoe adapters available which cost INR 2500 ($45). With this setup a variety of triggers, flashes, sync cords can attached to facilitate a seamless photo system for shoots.
Now a camera flash has become more or less mandatory but many of the professional DSLRs during the early 2000s didn’t have them. And as everyone knows during the film era the flash was always external. A built-in flash is more of a consumer feature than anything else. A professional wouldn’t probably need it anyway.