It’s been a bit over a year since I dropped my Nikon SB600, rendering it useless. When it happened I was able to disassemble the flash and identify the part which was damaged, but being a relative layman when it comes to circuit board components I didn’t know what to replace it with.

Apparently though, I wasn’t the only person to damage their SB600. Nor was I the only one who popped out the jewelers screwdriver and did a post mortem. David identified the part as a small inductor, and even provided the digikey part number that was the best fit to replace it.

Armed with the knowledge that someone else had repaired their strobe which suffered a similar fate, I felt empowered to take on the project myself. I ordered up half a dozen of the component from DigiKey and started psyching myself up for the project.

The repair

Now, I’m a pretty technically adept dude, and I’m not terrified to use a soldering iron. That said, I’m also not an electronics wizard so I did approach this project with some trepidation.

It took me a while to get the remnants of the old inductor off of the circuit board. The components on this board are all surface mounted, and I do not have a hot air rework station, just a simple soldering iron with a fairly sharp tip. The inductor did finally yield to my persistence and patience though.

Soldering the new one on proved a tad more difficult though. I had only one soldering iron, so I could only heat one of the two contact points at any given moment. As a result the new inductor is connected, but one of the contact pads is actually elevated quite a bit on top of a glob of solder. A little amateurish, but it gets the job done.

Modz

Since I was going to have the flash disassembled again, and since I had recently read this little teaser over on strobist, I decided to improve my strobe at the same time.

My first attempt to complete this mod was a complete failure as I managed to reverse the trigger and quench leads. I should have looked at this and maybe I could have avoided that. The failure was actually fairly hard to detect. See..

Both the trigger and quench signals are just a short to ground, and the both happen in such quick succession (trigger to start the flash, quench to stop it after a specified time) that it all happened well within the sync speeds I was testing at (1/60 if I recall). So it looked like the trigger was working, but the quench was not, when in actual fact the quench signal was triggering the flash and it was just popping at near full power! Oops!

After going back in and connecting the 1/8″ stereo jacks leads to the correct pins, I was still getting the same issue. This time though, it seems I have a problem with continuity between the quench pin and my stereo jack.

Results

At the end of the day, I chose not to try to fix the 1/8″ stereo jack mod since I didn’t want to pop the flash open again. I’m quite happy with the repair, and while my mod wasn’t quite as functional as I had hoped, it does give me the ability to trigger my SB600 using my radio triggers easily.

So you likely know that I recently dropped and broke my Nikon SB600 flash. Disappointed as I was about this, I was already thinking of how I’d replace it. My searches for Nikon compatible flashes had always included these apparently super affordable Phoenix flashes. Now, of course, I was always very suspicious of these for a couple of reasons. First, in all the auctions and other sites selling these I never saw information indicating if this had ANY manual control, and there was never a picture of the rear panel of the unit! Second, there weren’t really any reviews of it online. I found a few, but usually it was on something like Amazon where it was fairly apparent that those reviewing were (at best) uninformed users who wouldn’t know the difference between a “good” flash and a bad one.

In spite of those facts though, I convinced myself that spending $80 to find out if the thing is any good couldn’t hurt, right? Wrong! The thing got shipped reasonably quickly to me from the eBay seller, and upon opening it up it seemed like it had some potential. Yes, it was kinda cheapy plastic and felt light, but that is what I expected for something so inexpensive. The real dissappoinment came when I put it on my camera, and snapped a few shots. You can see the results here. Needless to say this thing, even when doing full power pops, can’t provide enough light to expose a shot properly. This, in spite of the fact that it’s a big, imposing looking flash. They did a lot to try to make it look like an SB800, hinting that it might actually have some decent performance.

So now, to answer some questions I had about it. This is strictly intended for use with iTTL. The back panel just contains a couple switches, one to turn it on, and one to switch “modes, and a guide for ISO/zoom/distance that this flash supposedly covers. The switch to change between “BL” and “STD” has absolutely no influence on the poor performance. Using a Cactus v2s to pop it seems to do only a very low power pop and the flash does not seem to recharge afterward.

The zoom is manual which is to be expected, and goes from 28mm to 85mm. When I zoomed it in to 85mm, and fired it I noticed some artifacts from the lens/diffuser which were distracting see here.

My plan was to use it along with a Nikon SC-28 iTTL cable to simulate the way I was using my Nikon SB600 when shooting butterflies on the fateful day that I broke it. I figured that I would lose some convenience having to go with a cable, and zoom the flash manually. I didn’t anticipate that the thing wouldn’t have enough power to expose a frame properly! So if you’re wondering if this thing is any good, and maybe thinking you’re willing to give up a little performance and convenience for a STEAL of a flash, think again. You do, sadly, get what you pay for.

For what I did actually do to replace my Nikon SB600, stay tuned. I went on a bit of an ill advised shopping spree, and have some exciting stuff headed my way!

Okay, first..  This post/rant was inspired by a few tweets from Chase Jarvis.  That said, I’m not throwing stones, or trying to start a fight.  The topic just got me thinking and I wanted to share my train of thought.  Chase, and any other professional who shots tethered, I’m actually jealous.  I wish I could shoot tethered.

Read more after the break…

So, the gist of the tweet(s) was about shooting tethered with the Nikon D3x and Aperture on a MacBook.  At first I thought "curse you Chase and your justifiable budget for fancy gear cause you’re a professional".  But then I thought, isn’t this just the professional expensive version of chimping?  If you’ve not heard of chimping, wikipedia has the best description I’ve seen here.

See, since I got my dSLR I’ve been reading a lot around photography communities, forums, and the like.  In that time, I’ve been able to gather that "chimping" is considered a weakness, and that "real professionals" don’t do it.  I don’t really subscribe to this mentality, afterall the manufacturers put the LCD on the back for a reason right?

I’ve recently shut off the automatic review of photos on my Nikon D80, for a number of reasons.  For one, it’s distracting to have the LCD glowing into your eye when you’re shooting a lot of shots in a dark situation, like in our living room at night capturing something our son is doing.  Also, the dials on the camera change function when the LCD is on to move back and forth between photographs, and the info that’s overlaid.  So if you shoot a shot, and keep the viewfinder to your eye, but try to change the exposure it’s ineffective and you just scroll through the pictures.

That said, when I’m doing anything other than "snap shots" I find myself pushing the play button to see the shot I just took.  Needless to say I’d gladly shoot tethered.  At the moment I have nothing but Windows and Linux based systems, and I haven’t commited to software for a RAW workflow or other tools that would allow me to shoot tethered, but I can assure you when/if I have all the tools necessary I’ll probably do it too.

So, I say to the critics of chimping…  Is tethered shooting really just an expensive version of chimping?  Is it "OK" for a professional to shoot tethered, and if so why is it any different than us mere mortals looking at the LCD on the back of our camera?  I submit that you are just jealous, like I am so you fabricate reasons that this practice is "bad" and makes you "weak".

Comments?

Okay, so it’s not news that the new Nikon D90 digital SLR has been announced.

The camera is the following (new) features crammed into a body with the same footprint as the D80.

• 12.3MP CMOS sensor
• 3 inch screen with “Live View”
• Built in support for GPS geo-tagging in your EXIF data (GPS receiver sold seperately)
• D-Movie mode for up to 5 minutes of 720p video
• Probably some other stuff that escaped my notice or didn’t seem important to me

12.3MP CMOS sensor

No surprise here, it’s a higher MP sensor, and is a CMOS sensor rather than a CCD sensor. To be honest, I’m not clear on the differences between the two, but CMOS sensors are what are in all the newer cameras, as well as my HDV camcorder.

3 inch screen with “Live View”

You simply can’t argue that a bigger screen is better, and the addition of “Live View” (basically the ability to use the screen as a viewfinder, like your point-and-shoot digicam) is pretty cool too.

Built in GPS geo-tagging support

Also pretty cool and allows you to show exactly where photos were taken, though there are ways to do this with some existing dSLR’s. Doesn’t really do much for me since I’m rarely taking photos in any really exciting places.

D-Movie mode

Yup, you can record up to 5 minutes of 720p video with mono sound with the D90. There is a lot of controversy about this ability, and many are calling it a gimmick.

Now, with all that said, I’m not ready to go out and trade my D80 in for one. “But I thought you said you were excited.”, I can hear you saying..

Well, yes.. I’m very VERY intrigued by the D-Movie mode. Now, as it’s implemented in the D90 I’d rather use my Sony HDR-HC1 camcorder to capture video to tape, but the idea of similar resolution captured through a nice Nikon VR lens with the ability to use nice depth of field tricks is very VERY exciting to me. There have been people who’ve speculated that Nikon may make the transition into a full fledged video camera using the technology from this camera. If they do, and they keep it affordable (say, under $2k), I’d be first in line for one!

Meanwhile, I’m looking into building an adapter that will allow me to attach my SLR lenses to my little camcorder to get depth of field (DOF), but I’d much prefer having something that does this sort of thing by design!

If you’re curious about the “DOF adapter”, I just recently discovered that such a thing existed from a labor day post over at Strobist.