Hot Shoe - History and Use

History and Use

Before the 1970s, many cameras had an "accessory shoe" or "cold shoe", intended to hold flashes that connected electronically via an outboard "PC cable" (not meaning a computer: the term goes back to the synchronization method of the "Prontor/Compur" shutters of the 1930s), or other accessories such as external light meters, special viewfinders, or rangefinders. These earlier accessory shoes were mostly the same U shape, and thus provided the template for the introduction of the hot shoe.

Canon, Nikon, Olympus, and Pentax use the standard ISO hot shoe with various proprietary electronic extensions.

Since 1988, Minolta switched to use a 4-pin proprietary slide-on auto-lock "iISO" connector. A compatible 7-pin variant, which allows battery-less accessories to be powered off the camera's battery existed as well, but was not widely used. Konica Minolta and Sony Alpha digital SLR cameras are based on Minolta designs and therefore used the same connector, officially named Auto-lock Accessory Shoe, as well up to 2012. Since the electrical protocol remained mostly compatible, TTL and non-TTL adapters exist to adapt ISO-based flashes to iISO hotshoes and vice versa.

Sony also used a variety of other proprietary hotshoes for other digital cameras and camcorders, including the ISO-based 6-pin Cyber-shot hotshoe, the 16-pin Active Interface Shoe (AIS) and the ISO-based 16-pin Intelligent Accessory Shoe (IAS). Some of their NEX cameras used a proprietary Smart Accessory Terminal (versions 1 and 2). In September 2012, Sony announced a new ISO-based 21+3 pin Multi Interface Shoe for use with their future digital cameras and camcorders of the Alpha, NEX, Handycam, NXCAM and Cyber-shot series. This quick-lock hotshoe is mechanically and electrically compatible with a standard 2-pin ISO-518 hotshoe, but electrically compatible with the previous Auto-lock Accessory Shoe with extensions, so that passive adapters ADP-AMA and ADP-MAA allow to use digital-ready iISO flashes on new cameras and some new Multi Interface Shoe equipment on older cameras, while providing compatibility with standard ISO-based equipment as well.

Canon uses a non-ISO-based 13+1 pin hot shoe, named Mini Advanced Shoe on some of its camcorders.