: First of all, forget about fancy flash tricks with the XA-series. They're
: designed to accept a specialized type of flash rather than the
conventional
: shoe mounted units. Consider flash with the XA cameras to be a point and
: shoot affair.
The A11 & A16 flashes for the XA allow much more flash control than the
average P&S. They have three modes: 100 ASA, 400 ASA, and manual. The first
are computer flash modes. Setting the flash to 400 when a slower film is
loaded would give you some elementary fill flash capabilities. You can go
further by changing the aperture after the flash has popped up, from its
default value of F4 (for which the computer sensor is calibrated) to
something smaller. You can change the ASA setting to tweak the ambient light
reading. Setting the flash to manual and using a smaller aperture than its
GN would need for the given distance also gives you fill capabilities.
But you're right of course that the larger rangefinders are much more
versatile, allowing any flash to be used, and manual setting of both shutter
speed and aperture. Besides these cameras (well most of them) have the
flashmatic system which is accurate, and very fast and easy to use (although
not very creative with a fixed aperture for one distance).
hnz
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