I have two AF540's and I never experienced hot-shoe sticking (first I've heard of it, in fact). I also found the build to be of excellent quality. Most of the time these flashes performed well and provide lots of light (about equivalent to a 300 watt studio strobe). The rotating head is super useful and was the main reason I got a 540 rather than the 360.
But after a year and a half of rather light [ahem] use, one of my 540's blew up, and cost me $170 for Pentax Canada to repair. Then two weeks ago I killed the same one myself by accidentally shorting the pins inserting it into a metal hot-shoe umbrella mount -- I forgot to shut it off! Gah! So that'll be another $170 no doubt. I've also found that P-TTL is all but useless for most of my work and I'm almost always using it in manual mode. Considering the relative fragility and there being no need for fancy-shmancy P-TTL circuitry, I'd seriously look into a cheaper non-Pentax flash next time. (As it is, I'm considering studio monolights for my next purchase.) On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 1:28 PM, Robert and Leigh Woerner <[email protected]> wrote: > > I am going to buy a new flash soon. I currently have the AF360 and want to > upgrade. Any thoughts/opinions/real experience with the Pentax AF540 vs a > Metz > 58 AF2? I am also open to other recommendations. I am mainly concerned ref > reported build quality issues of the Pentax unit and hot shoe sticking > problems. > > > Thanks in advance, > > Robert -- -bmw -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
