SunPak MS-4000 Pro System

I got a new set of lights a few months back. By new I mean new to me; they date back to the 1980s, as far as I can tell.

They're good lights. The flash tubes are fine and they can run at 100, 200, or 400 watts. They were originally designed to be portable, so they have hookups for batteries as well as A/C power and they have HH sync ports (household) which is good because the built-in slave sensors don't work any more. 

A SunPak MS-4000 is heavy, though, for a "portable" monolight, and there isn't a lot of documentation out there--like none, that I could find off eBay, and I'm not about to pay $40US for a "user manual" which might just be a slip of paper with a picture on it, so what I did is just hook them up and start trying ways to get them to run using modern DSLR equipment. Here's the process I went through. If you just want the gear solutions, skip to the bottom. 

First thing I did was to hook them up to power and turn them on and leave them on for about 4 hours without testing the tubes or flipping switches or anything. Just let them sit there with the power on. From what I've read, this allows the capacitors inside the hulking things to "reform" or "recondition" themselves, which means that putting current through them helps them to kind of internally repair themselves, as long as you don't discharge the capacitors during the process. 

After they'd been on without discharging for about 4 hours, maybe 5, I went ahead and hit the 'test' button on the back to see if the flash tubes worked. They did, on each output level, so that was great. The modeling lamps didn't work, though, and from what I'd found on the interwebs they were expensive, so I decided I could probably do without them. I can buy a desk lamp for $10US from the thrift store, so why pay $125 for something with a SunPak logo on it from 30 years ago? 

I run Canon 5D mark II cameras, which have low hotshoe voltage and they can be damaged by voltage which is too high, so I slotted a sync cable and hooked up a multimeter to the contacts. The voltage wasn't too high... somewhere around 8.3-8.5 volts, which is pretty low for a mechanical era light. 

I hooked them up to a Vello hotshoe converter for Canon cameras, and tried them out. Nothing. Well, it's not the first time I've had some issues with DSLRs and strobes. I had a Vivitar 283 which just wouldn't die, but it wouldn't run off anything but a mechanical SLR camera until I found Wein Digital  Peanuts (and took out the thyristor), so I thought that's probably where I'd end up. 

So, after fiddling a little bit, I hooked the sync cable up to my Pentax K1000 and BOOM!!! There was light! 

Knowing that they worked (this is when I found out the built in slaves didn't work) I decided to spend a little bit more time and money (maybe it's all money, since time is supposed to be a rough equivalent to money, even though mine never has been) finding a way to get them to work. After all, the price was right and the power was right, and a good 600W setup would set me back a lot more money than I have right now. Someday I'd love to get a good variable power setup, maybe a 5-light set just for fun, but I don't need it right now. I also figured I could add fills with speedlites, so wireless would be the way to go. 

Knowing I needed wireless, or at least some photo slaves to make a full portrait system work, I looked around pretty hard for a few weeks to find any information from anyone who had set up these lights and gotten them to work. Couldn't find a dang thing. I did find out that Paul C. Buff, Pocket Wizard, and Cactus triggers all had voltage max threshold ratings in excess of what was going through the monolight's sync port, so I went ahead and bought the Cactus V5 set. I like them. More on them as I get a chance to experiment more.

Tried several online resources, including chats with a few bigger online retailers, and didn't find out anything useful. They knew that whatever product I used should be insulated from a potentially high trigger voltage, but as far as dealing with retrofitting anything that old, what worked could be anyone's guess. 

Well, the Cactus V5 wouldn't trigger the SunPak either. Sometimes the receiving unit would just turn itself off, as well, so it didn't like something about the setup.

It was around this time that my wife reminded me there is a camera store in our town, and so I dropped in there and made an appointment to try out some of their equipment to see if anything would fire these monsters. Nothing worked there either, although they wouldn't risk a PocketWizard for testing purposes. I guess I don't blame them, but dang. Went home sad, but not defeated. Remember the Vivitar!

Well, I figured I didn't neeeeeeeed them right away, and I knew they worked, and I had some faith in Wein even though their website is only in Japanese now and seems to offer mostly bath products and ED cures. So I went ahead and looked on B&HPhotoVideo.com for a HH plug solution, and found a couple Wein candidates. 

First Wein I tried didn't work. Disappointing as hell. I was starting to think maybe there was something wrong with the sync port(s), or that maybe I had to have a battery hooked up to send the right voltage snap to the light, but the sync port voltage matched a table on the only website I'd seen which offered anything helpful on SunPak monolights.... Also thought that maybe the modeling lamp had to be in-circuit for the slave circuit to fire, so I bought a modeling lamp--Broncolor lamp for Pulso/Primo heads. Those theories turned out to be incorrect, but I found out that B&H offers some very affordable modeling bulbs which fit. Score!

Anyway, in a last ditch attempt, I ordered a different Wein slave. I was nearing my $50US threshold, and if I went past it I'd decided I'd give the lights away to someone who still shoots only film. Can't go spending months on a money pit when I could just save up and buy something cheapish which would get me by. 

Bingo!! The Wein L8 triggered them, from a modern Canon 600EX-RT no less. That was perfect. The modeling lamps didn't have to be present for the light to fire, so I was set, but I still bought a second modeling lamp, because they're nice to have during setup, etc. 

Next order of business was to get stands. It turned out to be a little bit more challenging than I thought it would be. As I mentioned, the MS-4000 light itself is Heavy; about 20 lbs. Any stand needed to be able to hold on to that as well as take the added weight of modifiers. After a bit of searching I did find a few good stands on B&H's used section which had the right size studs and a high enough weight rating. The studs, it turns out, are not that hard to change out on other stands, and a lot of them come with 1/2" studs on one side and 5/8" studs on the other side of a removable unit. 

The sad part about this is I don't have space to put them up and I haven't taken any photos with them yet. I have to trigger them via flash, and it's been too cold to go outside (don't want to shock the flash tubes in any way if I can help it). So I know they work but I haven't yet used them. I'll try to post some pictures soonish. 

Gear List:

The following stuff works. Ignore the stuff up above unless you need it for reference or you like a good mystery. The links go to B&H Photo Video; if I keep them updated, they'll work. Otherwise just search for those products. You can use any retailer you want, but B&H has always treated me right and I always go to them first.

• Wein L8 940-050 Micro Slave with HouseHold (HH) plug connection
• Broncolor Modeling Lamp for Pulso/Primo heads
• 250W/100V
• E11 Minican screw base
• Code on B&H Photo Video: EHT
• Giottos LC325 air cushioned light stand (10') with 5/8 stud

PDF-A is where it's at... for now

It's easy to look around at the world and see the fruit of professional graphic designers.

(I'm not one, just fyi)

It's also interesting to look around and see the number of different approaches to digital graphics problems. There are a lot of ways to bag your groceries, so to speak.

I work for a printer. It's common for novices to bring us posters to print which were made in Microsoft PowerPoint and which were converted to PDF. When someone says to me "I made it in PowerPoint" I wince inside a little bit and get prepared for things to shift around.

PDFs are not the "Portable Document Format" they want to be. They get better from time to time (also worse sometimes, but it's the same with everything) but the trouble with a standard is that not everyone will adopt it. Therefore Apple computers have one way of interpreting a PDF and Windows computers have a different way.

So? Fonts? I have them!

The big deal here is mostly with fonts (there are other things too, and that comes in a minute).

The first issue is that you might have a font on your computer which we don't have in the printshop. If that's the case, our computers either try to find that font or to substitute another one which might look similar. That's a kind of built in feature these days. Sometimes the computer will just assume you want to substitute a font, and so if it does that we will never know that you wanted SkagWorks Bold, because when we see it it will just be Arial.

For example, Times New Roman (TNR) looks basically the same whether it's on a Mac or on a PC, but the way it's coded in the OS is different. For that reason saving a PDF on one machine doesn't mean it will work correctly on the opposite architecture. It may be perfect, close, or totally wrong.

For a printer, hitting "SAVE" and walking away won't get you where you need to go. It might be close and that might be fine, or it might be just enough off that it ruins your day. Sometimes it will just print as an empty square. If my computer doesn't have the piece of code which properly renders a cedilla (ç) then it will just print a box, or nothing.

There's some history here, which is kind of interesting; why won't a font just get saved into your file? Why doesn't it just say, here are some pixels, put them in the right place?

Well, there are a couple reasons. One, fonts are big groups of code. They make a file bigger. One way computer geniuses have figured out to reduce file size (bloat) is to leave out the font. Many fonts already reside on your computer. 

The second reason is because someone probably owns that font. They own the code that displays that font. They may own also the visual depiction of the font set. So, in essence, a long time ago software companies basically agreed that they would not include the actual code for the font in the file they created unless they were sure someone paid a licensing fee for that font. 

A third reason is that Windows and Apple computers actually have different ways to coding the fonts and so it's a lot easier to just say "Use TNR Here" than it is to include a shunt to get the Apple computer to read a Windows font code line and vice versa. See reason one: reduce bloat by reducing unnecessary code. Just include a reference! ...and make it a short reference, or else we might as well just include the font set! :D

So, we're back to the reference, and your computer will read that reference and stick a font from your system into the appropriate place. The only time you can use that font is if you have paid for it (or stolen it, but please don't--the paycheck you save may be your own). You're leasing the use of it. You bought your computer, or maybe you didn't, but either way the OS includes some fonts. Most of the time this substitution will happen without anyone being the wiser. If you don't have that font on your system, it makes a substitution, sometimes by asking, and sometimes just on the fly. 

It's not quite that simple, naturally, but that's the gist of it. Not including the font code in your PDF makes it smaller, and more "portable," while getting around the licensing issue. Printers and media people probably license their fonts, or they pay for software which includes a font license. My grandpa, who just wants a recipe off the internet to print correctly and really doesn't care whether Tahoma Grande Oblique prints with or without flourishes, just wants to be able to use the document. So his system substitutes a font with that name, or if that name isn't available, another font which might look close to that one. His problem is solved, but ours is just beginning.

So, unless you're trying to get exactly what you designed on your screen on to a sheet of paper or canvas, you're done. Here is where we encounter the intersection of widespread usability and tailored/custom/professional tool and outcome intent. If you're being particular though, there are some things you can do to get exactly what you intend out of your print system.

Now what? 

Well, you can either just save your document as an image or you can save your document as a format which includes the fonts, or at least the reference set which allows any suitable computing system to tell exactly what you meant and where all the elements are going to go.

Images...

Saving as an image is kind of a last resort. Images are big, size wise, and saving an image so that it doesn't lose detail is kind of an art. However, it works if you do it right, because at least on a large-format latex printer, what you are getting at the end is a bunch of dots. They're very close to each other and maybe as high a resolution as 1200 dpi, but they're just dots and it's difficult to see anything but a nice, crisp line from any distance past a foot or so. If you have problems with fonts, or maybe there's just something in the file which doesn't work, save as an image.

If you're going to save as an image, don't use a JPEG unless you have serious bandwidth or printer throttling issues; use a TIFF or PSD, and leave the image uncompressed. Compression will always degrade quality, and while you might not notice that degradation on screen, you will almost certainly notice it on a print.

You can also use a PNG or BMP if you have to, because they are pretty close to the output format of the printer, but they tend to be big for no reason, and they also don't really carry color information very well. If in doubt, save as a TIFF.


Packaged Adobe InDesign files...


We LOVE packaged InDesign files. They include all the stuff we need. They have the pictures at their full resolution and they have the actual files the fonts are rendered from. In a perfect world, that is all we would get to print, and it's all we would accept. We could save a PDF or image to print from using our InDesign and our print settings and give you exactly, perfectly, what you are looking for.

PDFs

Of course, not everyone has InDesign. So, if you can, just always save as a PDF. PDFs retain vector information, color manage well, and are usually the smallest. The problem though, is that they're not just a picture, so some parts of the files need to be licensed or included.

PDFs have their own problems, mostly still related to program and OS architectures. See the PowerPoint section below for some more information, but in particular the ways the OS renders transparencies can be problematic. We need to save a PDF in a way which maintains the visual and content appearances of the document, and believe it or not, software designers are on top of it, at least as much as they can be.

We want either a PDF-A ("Archive quality"), or ideally a PDF-X (which is designed for being printed). Some software will let you save it this way, and some will not.

Saving as a PDF-A is a kind of good thing even if you won't have your PDF printed. It saves everything in the file in a way that is intended to make all of the information work even if you are running a stripped down computer with minimal resources. The "Archive" designation means that it tries to make the PDF as complete as possible, and unreliant on the vagaries of future machines (or contemporary machines which don't match your own machine's configuration).

What PDF-A does, in essence, is it saves everything that a guest computer will need to render that PDF document correctly in, say, ideally, 20 years. It saves pertinent information in architecture-independent forms and it saves the photos you inserted in the highest possible resolution. It tries to make your file last, and to be perfect when it gets to its recipient.

Either way, a PDF-A is a good way to get all your information from one place to another, pretty much regardless what kind of computer it gets used on last.

For printing, this is a good thing.

Why, Powerpoint? Oh Why? 

Why does PowerPoint not convert happily into a PDF like other programs (sometimes) do? You'd have to ask Microsoft, because in the end it's complicated. But not complicated in other ways.

PowerPoint basically draws like an old traditional CRT screen draws. It draws in lines, from the top down. It's designed for use on projectors and screens, so it does everything based on proportion of the whole screen. That way it doesn't look too funky if you go from a square projector to a rectangular projector on your sales route. (PowerPoint engineers could correct me on this, but from my deduction, this is how it works)

Printing something doesn't map the entire space and then squeeze something into it. Your printer, your RIP software, wants to know where to put a dot of ink. It's measuring out exact spatial places. Saying 40% of 60" horizontal and 14.355567" of 19.445% vertical is an inefficient way to map out coordinates on a printer. Imagine Jackson Pollack in an alternate universe as a pointillist; a very careful, very fast pointillist. 

Then we get back to fonts. Most newer versions of PowerPoint have an options button which pops up when you select Save As PDF. In that options panel it will sometimes mention PDF-A and sometimes just mention something about making a PDF archivable. Absent this option, you are tossing a bunch of element salad into a pretty big container and hoping that it doesn't get scrambled too much between your computer and our printer. 

Well, I still want to use PowerPoint (or It's All I Have)...

There are some things to look out for when you save your PowerPoint document as a poster.

1. Did you make it the right size to begin with? 
1. Every month someone comes in with an 8.5x11" poster and asks if we can blow it up to 56x20. The answer is no. No, we can't do that. And now you have to go back in and resize all your elements manually, because you started off so small. Check your document size in the beginning. 
1. Also, proportion is not magic. If we stretch it (we won't) it would look weird, our business would look sloppy, and repeat business would dwindle. Not happening. 
2. Did you insert pictures at the largest sizes possible? 
3. Did you cover anything up when you thought of a better design? 
1. Better go back and delete it now, because the PDF doesn't know that what's in front of it isn't supposed to be a transparency. We once had a poster on which a graph was superimposed on a repeating series of carats and the letter "c." The person was really wondering why CTRL+C wasn't copying something... well, somehow they were capturing the keyboard instead of operating a command. Dunno how. Anyway.
4. Did you check your PDF after you saved it to make sure there are no errors? 

This is a Long Post...

It's true. It's a lot to read. And there's a lot more to all of this. If you have questions, I'd like to encourage you to Google "Color Management" and "PDF Standards" and have a read. You'll quickly realize how MUCH information is out there, and how even small details can have a big impact on your finished product. 

You might also give Adobe a call, and tell them that Photoshop and InDesign are a little bit too high powered for users who just want to toss things onto a sheet and make a poster out of it. If they hear enough feedback in that regard, you might end up with a piece of software which prints great and also works on a projector in your boardroom. 

Toodles!