Last week I decided it was finally time to move into the digital age with respect to photography. My ZX-5n has served me well, but I found that over the past few years I've been mostly just scanning my pictures anyway, and it made sense to just eliminate that step.
Overall I'm more than pleased with the camera. Its image quality is fantastic, ease of use is great too, and so on. But there is one issue that has me perplexed.
When I use the camera's built-in flash, particularly with faster lenses and/or at closer ranges, the pictures come out anywhere from moderately overexposed to 99% burned out from severe overexposure.
Let's take, for example, the case of the SMC-Pentax FA 50mm f/1.4. Shooting at a distance of five feet, at ISO equivilancy of 200, in fully automatic (smart picture) mode, the frame will come out completely burned out. The camera is choosing settings of 1/60th and f/2.8. Anybody with any understanding of photography will know that a guide-number 15 flash, at a range of 5', with ISO200, shouldn't be shooting at f/2.8, but rather somewhere more in the neighborhood of f/11.
This problem persists, with slightly less severity, with other lenses too. For example, with the SMC-Pentax DA 18-55 f/3.5-5.6, at 55mm, the camera leaves the lens wide open (f/5.6) for the same shot, and doesn't stop it down at all.
I even tried setting the flash's EV to -2 just to get it to underexpose the shots. No improvement.
Now here's the crazy part. When I attach my trusty, tried and proven AF330-FTZ flash instead of using Pentax's built-in flash, the shots come out wonderfully exposed.
This is a problem that I never faced with my ZX-5n. It almost seems as though the built-in flash is NOT benefiting from TTL.
I'm hoping someone else who has encountered this might have a suggestion as to how to correct the situation without resorting to dropping into Aperture Priority mode every time I take a shot with the built-in flash.
Dave
