Battery issues
 

Just bought the new 700u from B&H, but my boss decided they wanted to save the company money by going with a third-party charger--the Varizoom 3802A--which is supposed to work with all chemistry types of A/B batteries. Also picked up a Hytron 100. Unfortunately, the charger won't charge my battery--it'll sit there for a minute charging, and then flash to full charge. The camera and battery both show only about a 25% charge though. The manual for the battery says it can ONLY be used with an Anton Bauer charger and that even older model AB chargers that don't support their new Interactive technology can't be used on it. Anybody got any ideas? I've gotta return this Varizoom, but my boss won't let me spend the dough on an AB charger. They'd rather have me shelf the camera for the 6-8 weeks that it's gonna take for the AB charger/battery to arrive as part of their rebate program.

I've got a big shoot coming up that's going to be difficult to do without this camera, because the headphones jack on my old camera (XHA1) has busted and I can't monitor my audio (an important component of this next shoot).

Is there a local rental house where you can rent a few batteries for your shoot?

That's what I do when I anticipate I'll need extra batteries, there's a shop here that rents them for $10/day per battery. Rent enough of them and they'll throw in the charger.

Hmm... Good thought. Unfortunately I'm 45+ minutes away from the closest big city, and over an hour away from the closest city that I KNOW has a rental place... And I'm guessing my bosses wouldn't authorize a rental, either.

I just wish there was a way to make this work!

Well, you could try and convince your bosses of the awesome utility of having the A-B on-camera combo charger/power supply and see if they'll buy one of those, perhaps used off of ebay? (Used batteries may have issues, but used chargers are usually OK.)

It's my only charger (currently) and I like it quite a lot... It mounts to the back of the camera, right where the battery would go, and powers the camera from normal AC power. You can mount a battery to the back of it, and should AC power drop, or you suddenly feel the need to go handheld while still rolling, just unplug the AC power and the unit seamlessly switches over the battery power without interruption. Finally, when the camera itself is turned off, the unit converts to a charger and will charge any A-B mount battery that happens to be mounted.

The ABs might charge on a 3rd party charger and since the Hytron is NiMH, you would think it would but when I had the Hyrons I could never get them to charge on anything but an AB charger. Pretty much any of the AB chargers will charge the Hytrons be it a Intellicharger 2 or 4 position (costly but also can power the camera with a 4 pin connection) or a Titan Twin 70 or now Titian Twin 60. Either will power the camera or charge but I don't think you can do both at once, however it sounds like it might not matter in your case. The Titan 60s are pretty inexpensive compared to other AB chargers and honestly when you have a camera the class of the HM700 and are using batteries like the Anton Bauers getting cheap on the charger isn't really an astute thing to do. Of course this comes from a confirmed AB person and one who used them for many years with my full sized rigs.

NiMh Hytron batteries are tricky to charge as the charger needs to know the cells temperature; as the temperature rises, the charger monitors the rate of change, and makes the decision to stop charging when the cells are fully charged. It uses the AB proprietary communication protocol to read the internal temperature.
This is the reason why the 3d party battery chargers can not charge them, their designers would have to crack the AB communication code and recreate the elaborate charging algorithm.
Li-Ion cells do not require that level of sophistication reading temperature, so the 3d party chargers can charge the AB Li-Ion packs.