About 5 years ago I purchased a Panasonic Lumix DMC FZ50 to take pictures of (among other things as well) my Busse knife collection. I found that if I set the camera on automatic and took outdoor pictures, they were great. The down side is that when I tried to take pictures of my knives with the flash on the camera in indoor lighting, the pics were terrible. I even went so far as to purchase one of those little tents that came with about 4 different canvases, and a couple of special lights. Still no improvement.
About a month ago, I saw a guy taking pictures with a hot foot flash and a camera similar to mine. I figured that if it worked for him, it certainly couldn't hurt me, so I got on eBay and found one that said it was compatible with my camera.
After some experimentation, I found that depending where your subject was in relation to the room, you could get very good pictures by pointing the hot foot flash properly. I found that for most indoor pictures of inanimate objects, pointing the flash at about 45deg upward and a little to the left or right, I could take some pretty good pictures.
For instance:
With hot foot flash...
No hot foot flash...