Canon EOS flash system

Canon Inc.'s EOS flash system refers to the photographic flash mechanism used on Canon's film (35mm and APS) or digital EOS single-lens reflex cameras. The line was first introduced in 1987. It has gone through a number of revisions over the years, as new flash exposure metering systems have been introduced. The main light-metering technologies are known as A-TTL, E-TTL, and E-TTL II.

The EOS flash system is capable of wireless multiple flash control, whereby a master flash unit IR (ST-E2) or RF (ST-E3-RT) transmitter mounted on the camera body can control up to 3 (optical) or 5 (radio) groups of flash units. The Canon EOS 7D is the first Canon body to be able to control Speedlites wirelessly without the use of a Master Speedlite or IR transmitter; four other EOS models, the 60D, 600D, 650D, 70D, and 700D, also have wireless flash capabilities. The 7D is capable of handling three slave groups. The other cameras can handle two slave groups.

Canon has introduced several different metering systems for its flash products: A-TTL, E-TTL, and E-TTL II. Each system represents different approaches to achieving the proper flash exposure.

A-TTL is an initialism that stands for Advanced-Through The Lens flash metering. As with ordinary TTL flash exposure systems, a sensor inside the camera reads the amount of light being reflected off the film during the exposure. When the sensor determines that the exposure is sufficient, it terminates the flash pulse. A-TTL, first seen on the T90 (which predates the EOS family), is a flash exposure system that adds a brief preflash during exposure metering when the camera is in the programmed exposure (P) mode. The amount of light returned from this preflash is used to determine an appropriate tradeoff between aperture and shutter speed in P mode. Depending on the specific flash unit and whether or not it is set to bounce, the preflash might be infrared or it might be the normal white flash. In an A-TTL system the sensor that reads the preflash return is located on the flash unit; this caused some issues especially when using filters as the filter would cover the lens (but not the sensor outside the lens) thus causing inaccurate settings. Some early Canon EOS cameras also used the A-TTL preflash in non-programmed exposure modes to detect "out of range" conditions; the "out of range" warning feature was dropped on later models, reportedly due to patent conflicts.

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