Could I power a flashead off my car?
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onform
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You could use your car battery with a cheap inverter but I wouldn't recommend it! 1. if you run the battery flat your in all sorts of trouble 2. A cheap inverter outputs a square wave form which is not very healthy for your studio head! You would be better off getting a second battery and a more expensive pure sine wave inverter.. that should do the trick. Just remember that you will effectively be dealing with mains electricity and potentially deadly currents though..
Garry Edwards
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100% right - don't take the risk!The charging of the storage capacitor matters not. Could be a sine wave, square wave or whatever so long as its DC. I have used a voltage doubler,tripler or quadrupler to increase the voltage. The waveforms are ghastly, but it gets there. Has no effect in the strobe. The only problem is the discharge of the capacitor puts a dead short on the voltage rail which mat affect the car battery.
Garry Edwards
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I bow to your superior knowledge - but I know someone who blew up a flash head doing just that, maybe it was just a coincidence but I wouldn't take the chance personally.
alastairb
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technically the currents that you will get out will actually be less than if you just shorted the battery due to stepping up the voltage
though the ac voltage you get out is the problem and far more dangerous than the dc voltage from the battery
Exactly,its as I said, a discharged capacitor puta a dead short on the line with no HD resistor to limit the current flow into a discharged capacitor. The resistor will slow down the current flow, but as the studio flash charges up in a couple of seconds there may not be a heavy duty resistor.
stevedunster
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All I know is I've blown up far too many devices using inverters. I'm not letting one anywhere near my heads.
They also give tiny amounts of current.
I'll be managing with speedlites through diffusers/brollies/tri-flash etc until I can afford my Elinchrom Rangers Quadra kit.
They also give tiny amounts of current.
I'll be managing with speedlites through diffusers/brollies/tri-flash etc until I can afford my Elinchrom Rangers Quadra kit.
ai3x
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That doesn't make sense. If it's DC it won't have a square or singe wave, it won't have a wave at all, it's DC.
Powering it depends upon your flash head. Most portable flash heads such as the ranger have a kit which allows you to connect them to your car.
Normal Studio AC strobes normally require a pure sine inverter. Some are ok with modified sine wave but some not, it depends on on the step ups they use to power the capacitor. Using modified sine wave (square wave) they can get really hot and damage the flash. Best just to splash some extra money and buy a pure sine inverter.
Alex
Using a 12v car battery you require an oscilator to produce an ac voltage. Then a reversed low to high transformer. Then, if a higher voltage is required a voltage doubler. This doubler also acts as recifier to charge the storage capacitor. Do you remember in the early days when flash bulbs were on the way out and electronic flash was taking over. The photographer would have a large black box strapped over his shoulder. This was the battery, usually 12volt.
Garry Edwards
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I remember them well, lead acid batteries that only powered 40 flashes (if powered was the right word
) with no power adjustment, they weighed a ton and cost a fortune.The firm I worked for had both Mecablitz and Braun models from memory, we used to argue with each other about which was worse...
In a way, memories like that make me laugh when people complain about the cost of modern flash guns, they may be seriously overpriced but cost a fraction of the early ones in real terms, and perform so much better.
