Sony HVL-F42AM External Flash Review

About Sony HVL-F42AM

Last year we bought our first DLSR camera – the Sony A350 which is a pretty good camera.  It wasn’t cheap but it takes great photos and is super fast which was a key criteria since one of the main motivations for buying it was to take pictures of our very active kids.  A friend of mine has a similar type of camera which he had bought about year before I bought my Sony A350.  One of the things he told me was to buy an external flash since he found it made a huge difference in the quality of photos.  I was ok with the photos we were getting so I didn’t bother with the external flash at first, but last fall I started thinking about it and ended up pulling the trigger on a Sony HVL-F42AM external flash .

First of all – I’m not a really shop-around kind of guy.  For some reason I like to think that the electronic markets are relatively efficient so it shouldn’t really matter where you buy your electronic product since the prices shouldn’t vary all that much.  In reality that is not the case.

I ended up buying the flash from an American company called Click 4 Digital which is basically an electronics wholesaler.   They had the cheapest price I could find at $229 US.  This seemed pretty good considering the other companies I looked at were all about $299.  Future Shop here in Canada was the only place I found the identical item and it was $385 there ($435 including tax).  Even with the exchange I was saving about $205 compared to Future Shop.

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