Not bad, just has a weird design flaw | LCD Timer Vertical Battery Grip for Canon 40D 30D 20D with Remote...

Pretty Good Grip... | LCD Timer Vertical Battery Grip for Canon 40D 30D 20D with Remote Control

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	• LCD Timer Vertical Battery Grip for Canon 40D 30D 20D with Remote Control Satechi Satechi average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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Low cost but mediocre functionality and questionable design choices

Quickly:
Pros: low price compared to OEM battery grip, fits my 40D very nicely
Cons: cheap parts, poor implementation of timers

Another reviewer talked about a button inside the battery compartment that needed to be pressed in to keep the unit working. I had no such issue. I'm not sure if the button referenced was in the camera's battery compartment or the grip's battery compartment but I suspect the camera's.
That button is placed there by Canon so that the camera will not operate unless the battery door is closed or the grip is properly installed.

The grip is worth the price (compared to Canon's pricing) just as a dual battery grip so I shouldn't have much to complain about, but I'm still disappointed in the quality of this product.

The blue backlight is anemic and completely useless in all but the darkest situations, that combined with the generally low contrast of the LCD display makes reading the display less than simple.

The instructions are poorly translated from another language and it took me a few tries to figure things out.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that the shutter release timer and repeat timer are integrated functions, which doesn't really make sense to me.
You set the timer to take an image every 10 seconds and HAVE to set an exposure time of at least one second or the timer will not release the camera's shutter. Setting the exposure to zero SHOULD fire the shutter at the shortest possible timing. To get repetitive shots at 10 second intervals you need to set the repeat timer to 9 seconds and the exposure timer to 1 second. In all but 'bulb' mode the camera will still only open the shutter for the time set by on the camera, the grip just count up to 1 second for no good reason. I'm hard pressed to think of a situation where one would want to take repetitive bulb exposures the way this grip/timer thinks we would and is not the behavior implied in the product's description.

The remote control only works in the specific remote control mode but it works reliably from a good distance.

For some inexplicable reason the timer also has a date/time function. The clock can't be used in any way to control picture taking, nor does it set the time on or from the camera. It's just there. Any on my unit the time resets to 1-1-00 any time I open the battery door on the grip even though the separate clock battery is installed, activated and charged.

Overall the construction is good for plastic. The wheel near the vertical shutter release feels cheap and is not as precise as the the upper wheel on the camera but gets the job done . The zoom buttons are very squishy and I have a hard time telling if I've pressed them and the timer setting buttons are almost too small, I have to press them with a finger nail to be sure I'm hitting the right one and pressing it down enough.

I'm still up in the air about this item and may yet return it because of the design and implementation flaws. It's very well priced compared to Canon's grip-only product, but its just so badly done in all the other functions that I'm having a hard time liking it.

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Not bad, just has a weird design flaw

I was debating getting a standard canon battery grip for my 40D but when i came across this, after a great deal of debating, I went with this one to see if it would be cool. Out of the package it looks nice, and buttons are functional. I slapped it on my camera and proceeded to a wedding to take photos.. When I would grab the vertical grip it would turn off... (as in the power would be lost). It became such a headache that I took it off and shot without it. Pretty much thinking that I was going to return it the moment I got out of there. I thought originally it was a bad connection in the neck, but it looked fine. I would press it and twist it and somehow it would click back on... The next night after looking it over, finally I realized that on the inside where the door opens to insert the battery tray there was a small button that needs to be pressed in to allow it to work. The door doesn't press it in far enough, and when you rotate it vertical the tray presses just enough that it turns the camera off! I have no idea why they would want to have that little button on there, as it serves no purpose. I ended up taking super glue and gluing the button fully depressed in order to use the camera with this grip.

Aside from that little bit of fun fixing buttons (hopefully this helps others with it) the grip is rather nice, works and does what it is suppose to do. If it didn't have that little button on there (i still don't understand why they have it) I would give this a phenomenal review. I do hope that doing this doesn't effect something else, but this is the only way to make it work properly.

(oh, and don't be scared, for some reason the product states "Works only with 20D and 30D cameras"... same body frame I guess)

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Pretty Good Grip...

As one reviewer noted, this grip has a weird design flaw - fortunately for me, I read his review before ordering, and was aware of that potential 'gotcha' because mine did the exact same thing. The battery compartment door, on the grip itself (NOT the camera's batter compartment) has a mechanism that mirrors that on the cameras battery compartment - a small lever that much be pushed in for the camera to operate. And like the other reviewers, the door of my grip's battery compartment door did not close tight enough to push it's lever in, thereby making its operation spotty. I superglued the lever in the closed position, and now it works like a charm. I like the way it feels, adds a nice heft to the camera, my 30D now has a wireless remote, and I can use 2 batteries at a time (or AAs should the need arise, a very handy option.) For the price, I am very satisfied and would recommend this product to others, just being sure to inform them of that battery compartment door lever issue.

Pros:
Wireless Remote
AA adapter
Once the gotcha was fixed, works well.
Price

Cons:
The LCD is not that useful. I wish it mirrored the LCD of the camera, but it mostly just is a calendar/clock. The grip supposedly allows some time-lapse feature, but I have not looked at that in depth.

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LCD Timer Vertical Battery Grip for Canon 40D 30D 20D makes photographing in a vertical position much easier and provides a better handling of your camera especially when you are using heavy lenses. The battery grip provides more energy for your camera than a normal storage battery would. The battery compartment holds either two lithium batteries (original or third-party manufacturer) or a battery magazine for six AA NiMh batteries. It is also equipped with a vertical-grip shutter button, dial, AE lock/FE lock button, and AF point selector button to enable exposure time setting etc. as well as the infrared remote sensor function. Continuous Shooting with set interval function (1 second-100 hours), Multiple Frame Function (up to 99 frames), Single Frame long exposure function can be set between 1/8000 of a second up to 100 hours.

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