Hi. I'm not a Pentax shooter, but I'm a Godox enthusiast who shoots Canon, MFT, and Fuji, and I had a ton of fun helping outline some stuff about the Godox system to Fuji users before the system came out, so thought I'd take a look and see if I could lend a helping hand for Pentax shooters curious about the system. I may get some stuff wrong for you guys (everybody's picture of Godox is slightly different) based on the other "flavors", but I do have cross-brand experience with Godox.
Originally posted by DeadJohn ... Do I understand correctly? For example, if someone had the Godox Pentax trigger, 1 Godox Olympus flash, 1 Godox Canon flash, and 1 Godox Nikon flash, they would effectively have 3 off-camera flashes for Pentax, and 1 on-camera plus 2 off-camera for the other 3 brands? All with HSS and TTL support?
Yes.
If the hotshoe flashes you're using are the TT685 or V860II, and they've all had firmware upgrades to grok the Pentax signalling.
The TT600/V850II is single-pin manual only and doesn't do TTL at all (but can do HSS as radio slaves). The TT350/V350 mini-speedlight is not built to do cross-brand TTL (or so Flashpoint support told me). But all do have built-in radio transceivers in the Godox X system and can be either radio master or slave. But the single-pin flashes, of course, can't receive TTL/HSS signals from the camera hotshoe, so cannot be TTL or HSS RF masters.
I have a TT685C that I can use in TTL/HSS/with M power control from an XPro-C on my Canon 5DMkII, an XPro-F on my Fuji X100T, and an XPro-O from my Panasonic GX7.
You are going to be waiting on firmware update announcements for all the TTL-capable lights in the system, including the AD200, AD360II, AD600, and AD600 Pro if you want to do cross-brand TTL with Godox triggers. Hopefully these will be released about the time the XPro-P is, but it may also be a wait (it was about a year for the Sony users until all the updates were out; for MFT/Fuji it was about two or three months from the releases of the TT350-O/TT350-F). Until that "-P" firmware update arrives and can be applied, you will still have manual triggering with remote power control, and (probably) HSS, but TTL will not be accessible until then. The HSS is more iffy than power control because some systems have had it off the bat, others haven't, and some have only partially had it with some of the lights, not all. Godox users know about firmware updates the way Yongnuo users know about production date codes.
You will want to get familiar with
Godox's downloads page, which holds links for the firmware updating software, the updates themselves, and all the user manuals in PDF format. Firmware updating will require a USB cable (micro for all devices except the A1 and the XPro, which require a USB-C cable) that can transfer data (not just charge); and Windows. If you're an OSX or Linux user, a virtual machine or OSX's Boot Camp will also work. If you want to do this for free, some hardy souls have used the open source
Virtual Box and
Microsoft's 90-day developer VMs.
Once all the firmware updates and flash releases (if they're happening) come through, you should hopefully be able to have TTL/HSS/remote power control over:
- TT350-P / V350-P
- TT685 / V860II (all flavors)
- AD200
- AD400 Pro
- AD600
- AD600 Pro
And HSS/remote power control over:
- TT600 / V850II
- AD600M
- QT600 II
You'll only have remote power control over the MkII-series A/C strobes in the QSII, GSII, DPII, and SKII series.
---------- Post added 08-28-18 at 01:33 PM ----------
Originally posted by morenjavi ...
About the V860, it's listed as 'supported at low speed' but I suppose no TTL for Pentax, as this flash is for Canon-Nikon-Sony...
Yup. I think you'd need a V860 II for that. The cross-brand TTL support comes via the built-in radio transceiver of the Mk II. Since the only X receiver you can use with a Mark I V850/V860 is the XTR16s which isn't TTL-capable, you won't get TTL. The only way to get TTL out of a V860 Mark I is via the foot, and they only built it in Nikon and Canon flavors. A firmware update can't add missing hardware, so I don't think a fix is going to be on the way for this. It's a good way to make you rebuy a Godox flash.
The XTR16 and XTR16s have been problematic for anything other than triggering and power control. Fuji users couldn't get HSS out of them until the v03 firmware update on the X1T. But Canon/Nikon users were supposedly getting HSS out of them off the bat (although you do have to set HSS directly on the AD180 and AD360 [mark I]). My guess is the Pentax picture might look closer to the Nikon one.
Here's my reasoning. Feel free to dismiss it. Godox's X system looks a lot like it was initially reverse-engineered off Canon's RT system (the UI on the TT685/V860II is very close to that of the 600EX-RT, and so far only Canon users can put a speedlight into groups D & E). Nikon and Pentax, like Canon, for backwards compatibility, use a standard hotshoe/pin layout and analog signalling, so reverse-engineering Nikon and Pentax should be more similar to reverse-engineering the Canon system. Sony has its weird MI hotshoe and probably, like MFT, is using some digital signalling on the foot so those systems have some issues (Sony isn't getting TTL accuracy with wider apertures; Panasonic MFT is getting banding with HSS). And Fuji is playing some very hasty catchup flash-tech wise, as they only introduced HSS as a feature in their system in 2016 [facepalm].