I have a SB-700 speedlight and I would like to buy a few YN560 IV speedlights. With other Nikons, I could control them with the SB-700 on the camera hotshoe using Master mode.
Can you do 100% exactly the same thing with Yongnuo YN560 IV speedlights (using the SB-700 as a master)?
No. You can't control YN-560IVs with an SB-700 the same way an SB-700 can control another SB-700 using Nikon's Creative Lighting System (CLS). Only the Yongnuo flashes with EX in the name have this capability.
CLS is a proprietary optical (light pulse based) signaling protocol that requires a CLS receiver in remote flashes. The YN-560 series of Yongnuo flashes are all manual-only flashes that don't have a CLS receiver. They do have a "dumb" optical slave sensor (similar to SU-4 mode on Nikon speedlights) that you can use with an SB-700 as a remote trigger, but only if you take the SB-700 out of master mode, and use it as a simple manual flash. And the only thing it can tell the YN-560IV to do is fire in sync with the shutter. That's it. (That's what "manual only" means).
To remotely set the power or zoom on a YN-560IV, you need another YN-560IV or YN-560-TX on the camera hotshoe, and this signaling is done over radio, not with light pulses.
You may want to consider a Yongnuo YN-568EX, etc. or a CLS-slave capable flash from Nissin, Metz, Godox, Phottix, etc. etc. instead. Look in specs and reviews for whether or not the flash can be used as a CLS slave. Be careful of any claims for "TTL optical triggering" as they may not be referring to CLS, but a simple "dumb" optical triggering mode that can ignore a TTL pre-flash and fire at the correct time.
See also:
