Welp, my Nikon SB600, which I’ve had for about a year and a half now has officially been declared dead. After dropping it yesterday it simply wouldn’t turn on anymore. I popped it open today hoping to discover what went wrong, after getting it pretty well apart, I noticed this.

Apparently the drop cracked the casing the F100 p3D (whatever that is) on the board. I did a bit of research and apparently permanent damage to the SB600 is fairly common after very minor drops, and in some cases they fail completely without any obvious trauma. I’m considering trying to identify and replace this part, but it’s a surface mount component, and I’ve never successfully soldered one of those. Anyone out there know what this thing is?

Even if I can repair it, I’m gonna go ahead and replace it. At the moment, I don’t want another SB600 after reading too many similar cases of failure, I don’t want to spend ~$300 for something that’s likely to get broken again quite easily. I’d like something that does TTL since that’s a big part of the reason I liked the SB600. I’m going to have to go with a TTL cord instead of using CLS for situations like yesterday where I was using it handheld, but it’s a small price to pay. The flash(es) I’m considering are around the $100 neighborhood and even if I were to break one of those, I can justify replacing one of those. More on that when I figure it out.

* UPDATE:

I’ve completed this repair, and the SB600 is now working fine, thanks much to David for identifying the inductor! You can read about my repair here.