Richmond, US
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For a beginner, you really need to think in other directions. Yes, it can be made to work. It can, in some cases, be made to be useful. It can be used as a remote, but only in limited cases. Worse yet, it's hard to tell in advance when the combination will work well and when it won't. Forget the fact that it's only $70, it will be frustrating.
Why: it doesn't work in through-the-lens flash metering mode. So you can't just plug-and-play as you can with the later flash units.
Instead, you can use the Auto mode. But instead of using the meter sensor in the camera that sees what the lens sees, it uses a DIFFERENT sensor on the front of the flash. It sees a fixed field of view, generally something about what a 35mm lens sees on a DX camera. If your zoom setting is something else, it will meter something different than what the camera sees. Moreover, it averages. The camera meters in different ways: matrix, spot or center-weighted. I don't think that auto mode uses the D (distance) function from the lens, either.
It can be used as a remote in SU-4 mode. In this mode, it will fire when another flash - of any sort or any owner - goes off. This is particularly problematic with your onboard flash, because it uses a metering method called preflash. When you trip the shutter, the onboard flash fires once at low power, which is then used to meter the flash. Then it runs the shutter and fires the flash a second time, this time during the exposure. Great, except that the preflash will fire the SU-4 remote. When the real exposure comes a few milliseconds later, the SU-4 will fire again. The only problem is that it won't have recycled yet, so it will contribute almost nothing to the actual exposure. (Even though it LOOKS like it is doing what it's supposed to, at least to the human eye.) You can work around this problem by also setting the built-in flash to A mode, but you're just turning off one function after another, and transferring the problem of making everything work together back to YOU.
I worked like this for a while, before I could afford another flash. It was exasperating, to the point that once I gave up on digital, went out to the car and got out my - gasp - FILM camera, where all this stuff basically works together. And I shot that house on film instead of digital just because of the problems with remote flash. (To be fair, this house was problematic - it had a lot of mirrors that made placement of the flashes difficult. But I got the job done in an hour with film, even shooting extra to be sure I'd have it.)
If one is experienced with flash, and has done a fair amount of work with remotes and/or manual flash in the past, fine. For a beginner, save up another $100 and get an SB-600 instead. _____
Brian... a bicoastal Nikonian and Team Member
My gallery is online. Comments and critique welcomed any time!
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