Originally posted by sajah Another little advantage of FA 77mm over 85mm F2: you can use internal flash for occassional social snaps. With 85mm F2 the internal flash will always go full power because it can't determine the current aperture setting.
With the limited range of the onboard flash, this is kind of a non-issue:
If you play around with apertures and shutter speeds for 20 minutes at the ISOs you want to use, it's real easy to come up with the correct combinations to give you good shots in manual mode.
For example:
I'm using an old manual Tak in M mode. I'm at 180 shutter speed, 400 ISO, and 5.6. Flash is up. I shoot. It's perfect, or I'm overexposed, in which case I shift to F8.
This combination will work for me in 90% of indoor shooting situations, give or take a hair or two and bracketing, between a few feet and the maximum footage the flash can handle.
In other words, there are pretty much some standard settings to be used indoors like this, especially when you're metering for skin color and it's percentage of grey. Regardless of the darkness of the room, you're still metering for that skin tone.