View Full Version : SB800 Problems????


Old Timer
04-03-2006, 06:49 AM
I have had the SB800 for about a year and have had very reliable results with it. However Saturday night I put it on the D70 to shoot a few indoor pictures at my daughters birthday getogether and started getting some very eratic images. I was mostly using bounce flash but I noticed that I was getting one image over expsoed the the next couple might be under and than one that seem to be right on. I switched to direct flash and got similar results. Anyone had this happen? If so what did you do? Have I over looked some setting? I was using the camera in Program mode at the time and the flash was on TTL. I usely get pretty good results this way with a little compensation dialed in to the flash. Anybody have any sugestions?

Speed
04-03-2006, 07:32 AM
I have had the SB800 for about a year and have had very reliable results with it. However Saturday night I put it on the D70 to shoot a few indoor pictures at my daughters birthday getogether and started getting some very eratic images. I was mostly using bounce flash but I noticed that I was getting one image over expsoed the the next couple might be under and than one that seem to be right on. I switched to direct flash and got similar results. Anyone had this happen? If so what did you do? Have I over looked some setting? I was using the camera in Program mode at the time and the flash was on TTL. I usely get pretty good results this way with a little compensation dialed in to the flash. Anybody have any sugestions?

The first thing that comes to my mind is the batteries. But that would apply to the underexposed shots, not the overexposed one.

The second thing that comes to my mind was to check to see if it was fully mounted in the hot shoe. I had my SB-28 do something like this to me. It wasn't metering and was firing on full power. Turns out, it wasn't mounted securely in the hot shoe. It fired, but it didn't meter. It just happened the one time, and I haven't had a problem with it since.

Old Timer
04-03-2006, 08:06 AM
The first thing that comes to my mind is the batteries. But that would apply to the underexposed shots, not the overexposed one.

The second thing that comes to my mind was to check to see if it was fully mounted in the hot shoe. I had my SB-28 do something like this to me. It wasn't metering and was firing on full power. Turns out, it wasn't mounted securely in the hot shoe. It fired, but it didn't meter. It just happened the one time, and I haven't had a problem with it since.

I thought about batteries, but like you said that would not explain the over exposure. I took the flash off the camera twice and remounted it, did not seem to solve the problem. I'm going to change the batteries tonight and run some test on the unit and see if I can figure it out. I was hoping that someone else had experienced similiar problems and had a nice quick solution.