YS D3 Duo update

Dan Bolt · Issue 136, Jan/Feb 2024 · pp. 31

Products mentioned: Sea & Sea YS-D3 Duo, Weefine fibre optic cable, Sea & Sea fibre optic cable, Olympus OM-D E-M1, Panasonic 45mm macro, Aquatica housing, Subsee +5 dioptre

If you read my review of the new Sea & Sea YS-D3 Duo strobe in the last issue of UWP mag then you’ll be aware I had a few occasions when the strobes would mis-fire and I wasn’t able to isolate the root cause. Since then I’ve been wracking my brains to try to think what could be causing the issue. RC mode is a protocol, and all units adhering to the protocol should be firing at almost a 100% accuracy rate. My first thought was that the sending unit (on-camera flash in this case) wasn’t using a strong enough signal. With Olympus cameras you can adjust the signal strength in the RC Mode menu; it has 3 levels of low, medium and high and defaults to low. Changing it to Medium made some difference and mis-fires were reduced, but not eliminated. Then after a few dives and pool sessions, I started to notice a pattern forming. It seemed that when I used a certain fibre optic cable the mis-fires w…