Problems with Anton
 

Hi

Just borrowed an Anton Bauer Gold Mount battery kit to test with my HD100.

This was a Dionic 90 and a Titan charger/power supply.

The 'Real Time' display was showing 3 hours and 60 mins on the pie chart. I don't know if this meant I had three hours or four but as it turned out I actually had less than ONE hour!

I had shot some footage and decided to test the capabilities to the limit by using servo zoom and having the LCD screen out as much as possible.

The VF display showed 14.6v at the start and dropped to about 13v when I got the dreaded 'low voltage' message..WHAT! I had shot about 20 minutes of footage.

I continued to use the battery to capture and evaluate the clips. As I said, the camera was powered up for no more than one hour in total.

I checked the 'real time' display on the side of the batter and it was showing '3' hours and 45 minutes left. Check out the AB home page if you do not know how this is supposed to work:
http://www.antonbauer.com/home.htm.

All the bars were still showing. I continued to use the camerea, thinking the low voltage message was some sort of glitch but, sure enough after a few minutes the camera powered off!

The battery was deader than a dead parrott!

Reading the blurb on the AB home page about it's 'unique' programming automatically detecting the camers load and calculating the battery's remaining runtime seems a joke at the moment, unless I just happen to have a dud kit.

So I thought I would see if anyone else has had any similar problems


I am recharging at the moment and will let you know how that goes



Tony

Sounds to me like that battery needs to be recalibrated. The Titan chargers have a mode to do this. The battery "thinks" that it has a full charge and will read as such when it actually doesn't. You should get hours of usage out of a Dionic 90.

Thanks Charles

As I said I am recharging now. Roughly how long should this take to fully recharge so that I can be confident that no matter what the display says, it is fully charged?

Tony

The battery indicator circuit works independently from the charge termination circuit. What I mean is regardless of the fuel gauge measurement being accurate or not, the charger will charge the battery fully and indicate ready on its display. Even if the fuel gauge is off at that point, it will catch up eventually during full discharge.
I doubt the battery is faulty as they are pretty good at it, and test discharge each battery before shipping. Is there a chance that you need to configure your camera settings, so it knows that it is powered by the AB battery, through the voltage reduction circuit (14v down to 7)?

Alex

How do I do that?


Tony

Tony, I can not answer as I do not have access to the camera. But I have a pretty good idea of how the AB system set up, so it is just my gut feeling. With the other cameras that use 12 or 14v natively (without the need for voltage conversion to 7V) it is a common problem. If the menu set up for the 14V battery, but a 12V battery is connected, the camera reports low battery very soon after start, as it expects higher voltage. Your problem sounds similar...

Alex

So from what has been said so far, either the camera or the battery needs recalibrating.

I have recharged the battery now and will shoot some footage tomorrow, so I will see how it performs and go from there.

Thanks for your input, much appreciated

Tony

There is no way to recalibrate the camera. That is a problem of the battery. I use a A/B bracket with Swit 88W batteries, there is no real time display but they can run for 4 or 5 hours. I didn't make any changes on the camera settings when I started using these batteries.

Do you know if the Dionic battery was new or relatively new? They are only guaranteed for a year (unlike some of the heftier AB batteries that are guaranteed for 3 years). They have a relatively short lifespan (don't know for sure, my guess would be less than 2 years) and this would hold true whether they are used constantly or not used at all. I have two Dionic 90's, one new and one about 10 months old, and they each last for a full day of documentary filming (camera on 7 hours, filming 3-4 hours with LCD screen).

You might want to call Anton Bauer - I've found their phone tech support quite good.

Tony lives in UK, I think that by the EU laws all countries must offer a 2 years warranty for any electonic device.