where there’s smoke there’s forum fire
Mine actually overheated and shut down after shooting my cousin's wife throwing the bouquet at the reception. I suppose given the circumstances (rapid firing at a dark venue) it'd be quite common to overheat it.
I spoke to the professional photographer and he said his overheated all the time so he just disabled it.
I was only shooting casually so I didn't have the backup flash with me, but it was quite frustrating when it stopped working and all you could do was sit and wait for it to cool.
My SB900 overheated for me repeatedly over this last weekend while the Celebrant was cutting the cake. Now it looks my SB900 have blown out, as I can no longer switch on my SB900. My SB900 is still less than 3 months, since I bought it. I have taken it back to the shop, i bought if from and they are going to send it to NIKON for repair. What can I do now, can I exchange it to a SB800 or ask them to give me another SB900 that has the same problems of over heating?. What can I do in future to avoid SB900 overheating?
Regards
OTIS
Mine has only overheated once (burning smell) and I just swapped the batteries for ones in a baggie with an ice pack. Gave about 3 mins and continues shooting... My overheat is disabled. I also seldom shoot at full power but rather use it as fill flash (M not I-TTL)
Hi,
I took the coward's way out. I have several and during events I have a spare on my person to switch out during failure. It's the 'sure thing.'
My best,
Mike
Funny, I've never once experienced an overheat warning and I keep the thermal shutdown option ON. My Sb-900 is fairly new, but even after 400 or so fast succession shots in the span of about an hour, the unit barely heated up according to the temp gauge. The batteries were pretty hot, but the unit stayed fairly cool. Maybe they made a design change recently? Firmware is V5.02.
I'm really impressed with this unit, honestly. It's a great speedlight, really. Love Nikon's CLS and i-TTL.
I shoot primarily weddings and always bounce, usually at half or full power. I used to over heat my units all the time. Before the firmware upgrades, I drilled two little holes on the side of the unit, where the diffuser clips in, and then used a baby aspirator to blow air into the unit (if I had the option of dumping the batteries and leaving the door open, I would do that as well).
Just drilling the holes made a noticeable difference. With the aspirator, I could cool a unit to operational temps (pre-firmware) in a matter of minutes. With fresh or iced batteries I could keep shooting for 30 minutes or so.
My advice is to have a backup flash. If that isn't possible switch to normal alkaline batteries leading up to important events. The normal batteries don't have the ability to push so much current and therefor heat into the unit. I have only had one sb900 over heat while using normal alkalines. If you're like me, the cost of the extra batteries is too expensive to justify them so modify your shooting technique.
Shoot at higher ISOs. That lowers the power that your unit has to put out and thus lowers the amount of energy that it needs to take in. At receptions, when I know I'll be shooting a lot, I never shoot lower that 800 iso. Shoot at wider apertures. I can shoot on one set of my rechargeables almost all night at 800 iso and f/2.8 in a room with 10ft ceilings.
It's a great unit. That said, I always carry backup because it fails so often. I will say that it has some 50k fires, mostly near full power and is still going strong. Then again, so does the sb800 and it has never overheated on me.
I have used the SB-900 for several events. I was at a wedding on Dec 31st when it overheated for the first time since I started using it, during the introductions, and Cake Cutting. As luck would have it, I used the Videographer's light for the cake cutting. I usually shoot the reception at ISO 1600. The only reason I can see had a problem is, I used a telephoto lens and I had the flash on camera and shot very rapidly. I usually shoot the SB-900/800 off camera, however, the DJ didn't prompt me, and I wasn't set. Tough wedding, when the DJ just moves on without any cue.
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