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Hasselblad H on tech cam, external battery hack

torger

Active member
I've looked around for external battery solutions for my H4D-50 but not liked what I've seen. Having an extra pouch with a battery and a stiff firewire cable to mess around with is no fun out in the field.

So I bought a $40 ebay battery, a Duotec band (a form of hook-and-loop) and a firewire-to-dc L-plug from Leaf. The DC-to-DC cable came with the ebay battery, here I've been lazy and not shortened it just folded it up. The battery holds power in the back for almost five hours (passive), so it's okay.

I was expecting the Leaf L-plug to point down rather than up, but as Hassy has the port on the opposite side as Leaf (I think) it points up, but it's okay, the cable mess gets out of the way.

The Duotec band is very strong, so I had to use very narrow strips to not have it sit too tight. The battery weighs only 180 grams (6.5 ounces) so it does not need much strength to sit. The mounting does not look too good but it works and is more practical than any other solution I've seen. As seen in the attached pictures you can mount the back in both horizontal and vertical orientation, and the sliding back fits down into my backpack as before. In other words, the external battery won't slow you down, it's attached all the time.

Haven't used it in the field yet, but should work fine. You don't need to worry about the Duotec glue either, you will be able to remove the strips from the back without leaving marks.

On the minus side is that the weather-proofing is not great :), but I can live with that, and you could make some hacks to improve that aspect too.
 

torger

Active member
Battery is one of this:

12V 3800mah / 5V USB 5800mah DC Rechargeable Li-ion Battery Pack with UK charger | eBay

It's a cheap china battery, the same type that Silvestri sells. When I compare side by side it's obvious. I got a Silvestri battery first but unfortunately it was old stock so capacity was down at ~40 minutes, going to send that back. Although the finish of the battery certainly is not nice (it really feels cheap), I'm so far happy with the performance and I'm probably going to get another one. I haven't find a high quality battery this small, the typical recommendation Quantum Turbo SC is too large to fit on the back.

After having tried having a separate battery and cable out in the field I can say that I'm going with this solution. Having that extra cable and battery to mess with when setting up the camera was not something I liked.

If you order an L-plug from Leaf, I can recommend getting their long "large format" synch cable too (in the picture). The Hassy back has a tight flash sync opening close to the adapter plate, so you want to have a small plug, and most high quality synch cables have large ones which is hard to fit. Leaf's is small. Cheap synch cables have often small plugs too, but after having at least two cheap sync cables fail on me I'm not using them anymore.

Oh, you'll need to cut away some rubber/plastic with a knife from the Leaf L-plug to make it fit in the Hassy, but it's easy.

If you're good at soldering you can make your own DC to firewire cable directly and skip the L-plug of course.
 

Dogs857

New member
Ingenious.

You will have to forgive my ignorance on all things Hasselblad but do they not use a battery?? Are these backs powered by the bodies??
 

torger

Active member
Ingenious.

You will have to forgive my ignorance on all things Hasselblad but do they not use a battery?? Are these backs powered by the bodies??
Yep, they are powered by the body. It's nice when you have it on the body as I think the camera gets a little bit better balance and looks less bulky, but it's not great for tech cam users of course.

The CFV backs have their own battery though as the V body can't provide power, and starting with the H5D series and also the H4D-60 (but no other H4D back, my is a H4D-50) you can get an external battery adapter so you can put an external battery on the back on the underside just like I've done. Their adapter has a bit nicer finish than mine though ;)
 
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