Hot shoe
An accessory shoe is a slot, usually on top of a camera, for mounting accessories such as flashguns, rangefinders, light meters or special viewfinders.
A hot shoe is an accessory shoe with added electrical contacts for flash synchronisation. One contact is a round, central dot, surrounded by plastic, the other is the shoe itself. This allows mounting a flashgun without a synchronisation cable.
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The size of the hot shoe has been standardised, as ISO 518:2006.
Some electronic cameras with dedicated flashguns add extra contacts into the hot shoe to allow the camera and flashgun to communicate, allowing for automatic flash exposure. There is no standardisation between manufacturers for these additional pins.
Very much later than the introduction of the hot shoe, a plain accessory shoe has become known by the back-formation slang name "cold shoe".
Links
- Wikipedia Hot Shoe article
- Inside Straight: Shoe Fetish accessory shoe history by Herbert Keppler
