I posted a similar topic to the Flash and Lighting forum but thought it appropriate to also post here.
I own and still love my A620 but find the built in flash virtually unusable. I have made simple modifiers to soften and diffuse the light but built in flash is not a strong point of this or most p & s cameras.
In the proces of moving to DSLR and assembling a small studio set up I bought an Alien Bee 800 strobe. Without even realizing it at the time, I discovered that if the AB800 is in the Slave mode (no sync cord plugged into the sync jack) it can be fired from any flash and it does not have to be of great output or in line of sight to work. This is just an optical trigger and there are many dedicated optical triggers out there that you can connect to a strobe or flash unit and this is pretty neat if you like your point and shoot and really have no intention of moving to DSLR or changing cameras. I can't vouch for how well any other triggers work but I can tell you that the AB strobe fires perfectly every time and I can move around as I please with the camera.
When I do fire the strobe from the A620 I drop the flash output level down and put a small piece of white paper in front but honestly I don't even think I have to because the amount of light it puts out is insignificant compared to the output from the strobe.
So if you have point and shoot and are thinking of doing portraits for family or want to have better lighting this is definitely a good solution, and as I said, you can do this with many other optical triggers and just about any flash you like.
EDIT: Oh yes, I did forget to mention that the camera must be in Manual mode to fire the strobe without a pre-flash problem.
