Good flash for the money, especially now that the SB-800 is out of production and the SB-900 is at least double the price. So for about the price of the SB-600 you get a flash that has almost all the features and is even more powerful than the SB-800 (as far as I can see it just lacks PC syncing, but I haven't used it it doesn't anyway). Well yeah it doesn't seem as reliable as a Nikon flash but it does everything it's supposed to. As another poster noted, you'll need to mount it to the camera if you need to use it as a standalone wireless slave, but if you'd rather use wireless triggers (which have always been more reliable) for your flash experiments, you'll love it. to take full advantage of manual output capabilities from full to 1/128.