Nauticam External Battery pack

[rks]

Is anyone using this in their housing? It seems like a great solution to the power hungry A6300/A6500 cameras and especially as you have to use the internal strobe and burn even more battery, but I was reading the manual and something it in it has to be wrong: 36331 Battery pack for NA-A6500.pdf

At the bottom of the instructions it says this:

Tips:
It is suggested to always check if the battery pack is active before going into water. The battery pack will be inactive once the camera battery is fully charged. Re-plug in the micro USB cable is required to re-activate the battery pack.​

That would largely make this unusable IMHO. I mean would I Start the dive without a full camera battery? This would mean this pack won't work to do what it actually should be doing which is extending the life of the camera.

 

[jstrang]

I used the external battery pack in Truk with my sony A6500 and is was wonderful. 3-4 hours of diving and doing both video and stills and the battery was awesome. I just left it in the nauticam housing, completely sealed all day and recharged it at night. It does use the camera battery first - then recharged from the external usb power. I agree it would be nice if it used the external battery pack first.

There is a setting on the sony A6500 to use external usb power that I had on but it still used the internal sony battery up before it used the external nauticam.
My video lights unfortunately didn't last as long and by the end of the last dive were done. I guess I'll have to buy more video lights - much to my wife's dismay.

 

[rks]

awesome thank you! Any other thoughts on the housing, mine should arrive next week, and I'm heading to Wakatobi in a short time to break it in, hoping to hop in the water before then to try it out first though.

I also got confirmation from Nauticam that this limitation was only on earlier versions and that it now behaves as expected. I really don't care which battery goes first as long as it has the effect of extending the battery life, which the way it was worded above it would not unless you started with a near empty battery in the camera.

 

[Fishrider]

Super nice housing. Coming from a NEX-7 this is step up in ergonomics. If you can afford it go for the 45° VF. I do almost strictly wide angle, and still found it a huge step up after being super skeptical. Yes, it is expensive, and I took many pics with my previous setup without one. External battery is nice as well. Like most housings it is negatively buoyant, and if you have a larger port like the 7" it wants to turn up on you. My wrists haven't really noticed, but I hear some find it taxing. I would like to weight down the port, but I think that would put undue stress on the connection. Possibly, just having bigger floats on my arms would help. Note to self: Make damn sure the guy on the boat has a hold of your rig. A testament to Sony and Nauticam: My rig went about 35-40ft straight down. Dive master recovered the rig quickly, and there wasn't even a scratch. DM got a nice tip though.

 

[dlutzer]

How is it switching between the EVF and monitor? How do you do it as the EVF switches off when the monitor is tilted out?

 

[TheToothFish]

How is it switching between the EVF and monitor? How do you do it as the EVF switches off when the monitor is tilted out?

Check out this topic discussed below:
A6500 (or a6300 I'd imagine) using the viewfinder...

 

[rks]

here'st he link to make it even easier: A6500 (or a6300 I'd imagine) using the viewfinder...