New SB600 Flashing LCD (Help!)

[JDDavis]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FZ_lCfpVGw

I just received this new SB600 from Amazon yesterday. I've taken about 5 test shots with it and it started this flashing LCD business you can see in the video. I'm not a flash power user by any means and I can't figure out what's going on. I've tried everything. Resetting the flash, batteries out, resetting D90 and batteries out of it. Tried it on and off the camera. If I let it sit with no batteries for about 20 minutes it will work again. I'll take one pic and it starts the blinking. When it's flashing like this nothing works and you can't reset the flash or even turn it off. Also the top LCD on the D90 flashes.

I've searched the internet and there is mention of issues but in most of those the flash still fires even when the lcd blinks. Mine will not fire. The other reports are of Nikon charging 127 bucks to replace the PCB board. Has anyone experienced this? Any fixes? Do I have a conflicting setting somewhere? I'm guessing I'll be returning this thing thru Amazon real quick.

Thanks

 

[JDDavis]

The internet made me do it!

You'll have to collectively forgive me. In this case Google may have made me dumber. I was so quick to jump online and Google my issue that I may have latched on to the first similar problem without spending more time investigating myself. And thanks to my iphone 4 I had a video of my problem up on youtube almost instantly.

Anyway. The problem may be with the NiMH rechargeable batteries. They are new and supposed to work with the flash but when I put in an old set of alkaline batteries everything seems to work just fine. Don't know if it's NiMH rechargeables on the whole or I just got a bad set. I don't have another set to test the flash with. I'll just stick with the alkalines for now since they are working after more than 20 shots.

You may wonder why I just don't pull this post. Well, I'm pretty comfortable in my own stupidity and someone else may be able to learn from it. Hopefully for me it was a battery issue and not the other blinking LCD issues I found online.

I think I'll call it a day now....

 

[gnd]

Some electronic devices can be very picky about the input voltage and different types of batteries have different voltages:
- Alkaline start at 1.3V (under load) and then drop slowly down to 0.8V,
- NiCd have a relatively steady 1.2V,
- NiMH start around 1.25V at discharge and drop down to 1.0V,
- LSD NiMH (Low Self-Discharge NiMH - Eneloop from Sanyo for example) act very much like normal NiMH during discharge

Since NiMH self-discharge over time it is possible that the batteries you tried weren't up to their full capacity and thus had a lower voltage. I'd try using low self-discharge NiMH batteries if you're not planning on using the flash on regular bases.