The 283's would have fried the circuitry for sure. The 285, it depends, the early ones would have been harmful, but the later "HV" would have been fine. I still have one of each of them plus a Sunpak 522 "potato masher" among other units. There is a trick getting older TTL units to work on the Nikon DSLR's. If it has the TTL foot, you have to tape over all but the center pin in order to get them to fire as the cameras are expecting information from the other pins , but the information they are sending isn't what the cameras are expecting...I do this taping with some older ring lights...Oh & you need to shoot in manual mode on the camera & either manual or "auto" mode on the Thyristor flash units
charles brown wrote:
In film days I has two 283 and one 285. Great flashes. Along came digital age, none worked with digital camera, Nikon. Told then If I tried could harm camera circuitry. Gave all away.