Nikon d7000 flash voltage?

I have an old flash (vitar 2800-D) but I heard old flashes are bad to use with new camera. Can anyone clarify, I don't want to screw up my camera.

This has been floating around for 10 years now… In all that time, I have never heard of *anyone* actually frying their camera. I use flashes similar to that one, and many other old flashes. The one in the avatar photo to the left is not a low voltage unit by any means.

The issue with the 2800D is that it may be a dedicated unit to a specific type of camera. Look at the bottom of the hot shoe end. If it has a single large pin in the center, it will work fine. If it has more than 1, you need to check the pin pattern against the pins in the hot shoe in your camera. If they don't match, the flash may not work at all.

Find out if it was intended for Nikon cameras. If it was, then it probably will be OK.

There's some truth to your statement. In the older days of cameras, the flash was fired by a set of "dry" contacts in the camera, such as a relay. In some situations, this means that flash units can present high voltage to those contacts - and can even exceed 100VDC.

With the newer digital cameras, they no longer use relay type contacts, but they are now electronic contacts; Opto-Isolator, MOS transistor, etc. These devices typically work on low voltage - perhaps as low as 3VDC.

In some cases, you can fry the electronic contacts in the camera by using an older flash. And if an older flash is intended to work with Nikon cameras is no guarantee it will be safe to use on a modern digital camera.

Canon cameras tend to be more sensitive to high-voltage flash units, but I would not consider Nikon cameras to be immune. So there's some risk to using old flash units with new digital cameras.

But there's a solution.

If you are concerned about the risk, you can buy a "flash isolator", which contains an opto-isolator designed to handle high voltage flash units and couple them to low voltage camera flash circuits. This would be the safe option.

http://www.amazon.com/...t/B008BMR…

You can probably use this with your camera without problem.
Nikon DSLRs can handle 250V trigger voltage (see page 275 in your manual). According to http://www.botzilla.com/photo/strobeVolts.html the Vivtar 2800-D is a low voltage unit, however, older 2800 models were a couple hundred volts. The best thing to do is measure the voltage at the hot shoe contacts with a digital multimeter.