Originally posted by ScooterMaxi Jim What does the history have to do with it? I started out when aperture-preferred was an advanced mode. For a long time, I ignored the on-board flash in preference to use of an external flash (not to mention that the *istD had circuit board problems where the flash would drain the battery well beyond what should have been required)
My point was that whoever added flash to high-end cameras (was it the same Canon crew that gave us the awful black "stealth" cameras?) may have just done it as a marketing move. There is no necessary reason for a camera with a hot-shoe to also have a flash built in. YMMV, but my experience has been that flashes are one of the least reliable parts of photographic equipment; since they are also amongst the least needed in the basic camera, that is the obvious thing to remove if something has to be removed for some reason (comparing my Pentax Super Program, bought in 1984, with my Canon EOS Elan bought in 1995, it appears to me that the volume of the "hump" more than doubled when they stuff a flash in there).
Originally posted by ScooterMaxi Jim As for not reliable? Really, you haven't had an RF battery fail, bad connection, let alone the myriad problems inherent in pTTL? A nice solution would be for Pentax to restore real TTL by putting a sensor in the body - that would be a step in the right direction. Instead, they abandoned the far-superior legacy TTL version in the crappy, decontented new flashes. In any event, a decent optical slave (such as the Wein HS) is virtually 100% reliable from a wide spread of angles - with a very low trigger; the only problem are situations where you have other flashes triggering. A decent optical slave gets very reliable results.
Apparently our experiences differ
I'm not sure why this has become such a hot issue. In just a few hours we will find out what they have actually done. We may even understand why they have done what they have done. In the meantime, it would have been sufficient for some to say "bad" and for others to say "good". And I'm going to take my own advice; I have expressed my opinion, and why. Now I will wait for actual news and make no more comments on the matter of flash in the meantime.