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| © Tom Parkes |
King of the impossible: the SB-700's head rotates 180 degrees in either direction
In the past week I’ve added a Nikon SB-700 Speedlight to my existing set of SB-800s. This new flash refines some of the most useful features of the SB-800, drops quite a few of the least used ones and doesn’t suffer the overheating which reduces the usability of the physically larger and slightly more powerful SB-900. At the time of writing, Nikon has just announced the replacement of the SB-900 with the SB-910 which attempts to address the overheating by slowing the recycling time as the flash begins to heat.
Comparing the SB-700 with the SB-800, missing are many of the legacy flash modes, a modeling flash button and ports for wired syncing and external battery packs. The latter is not an issue for me as I no longer use external power sources with small flash and the SB-700 recycles in under two seconds with NI-MH batteries onboard. It also accomplishes this in a silence I find disconcerting, so accustomed am I to hearing the whine of a shoe mount flash and taking the ending of it as a sign that the flash is ready to go. I wonder if Nikon will consider extending the optional ready beep available in the remote modes to the shoe mounted function? It seems to me this would be possible, at least in theory, as like the SB-900, the SB-700’s firmware is updatable via a suitable camera body. On the subject of batteries, using four AA cells to achieve better performance than was previously managed with five makes the use of NI-MH cells more practical as I’ve yet to find a charger which accommodates units of five.
The SB-700’s head also (finally) rotates 180 degrees in either direction, greatly helping with both bounce flash with the speedlight in the hotshoe, orientation of the remote sensor with the master and aiming a camera mounted master at remotes. In that respect, the SB-700 makes a fine master flash, albeit of only two remote groups instead of the regular three controlled by the SB-800, SB-900 and the SU-800 remote controller. Where the SB-700 scores is in its ability to point directly at at least one remote, enhancing performance in open spaces. But more importantly it’s now possible to control remote units in manual mode in increments of 1/3 stop instead of the previous full stops.
Also new with the SB-700 are two clip-on hard plastic filters which appear to be a full CTO and a full Plus Green. With the camera in auto white balance, the filters are detected via switches on the flash which are depressed upon fitting one of the filters with the camera setting the appropriate white balance automatically. In tests, I found the setting chosen by the camera to correspond with the orange filter to be too warm for my taste, with the built in tungsten preset being more accurate and dialing in a kelvin value in the region of 2700-2800K closer still. Interestingly, the green filter sets a white balance on the camera which does match the filter well and importantly, it doesn’t seem to be one which can be simply dialed in from the preset fluorescent WB menu. How useful this will be in the field remains to be seen as fluorescent light sources have changed considerably since colour scientists in Rochester chiseled the 40CC Magenta filtration on camera maxim into the surface of the first 18 percent grey card. Given today’s real world mystery-vapour lamps it’s often worth trying the CTO first. But the new filter/WB combo means we now have an extra option open to us in the war against discontinuous spectra.
