High-capacity LiIon-powered external battery pack.

Slick design, mounts to camera's tripod socket.

Full set of adapter cables provided, compatible with nearly 200 digital cameras and camcorders.

Handy "gas gauge" display shows remaining capacity.


Second only to shutter lag (my personal number one pet peeve), battery life is probably the single biggest complaint most digicam owners would have about their camera. While strides have been made in the last year or two to reduce power consumption, there's just no avoiding the fact that digicams have hefty appetites for power. For casual shooters, this may not be a big issue, since it's easy enough to pack along a spare battery or a set of them for an extended outing. If you're a real "enthusiast" user (fanatic?) though, you can quickly end up carrying several sets of batteries with the attendant hassle of keeping them organized and paying attention to which sets are used, and which are still fresh. Worse, Murphy's law applies in spades to digicam battery life. The batteries are always destined to go dead just as the most compelling shot of the day happens by. - And it's no help having a spare set in your pocket if the critical moment is right now. You're still dead in the water for at least a few precious seconds.

To address the problem of short battery life, several manufacturers have developed external battery packs to provide extra juice for long shooting sessions. To date, most of these have consisted of a belt-mounted battery pack with a coiled cord that goes to the camera's external power jack. These work well enough (quite well, in fact), but the long power cord stretching to your belt can get in the way. - And if you want to use the camera on a tripod, you have to resort to some sort of a cobbled-together strap arrangement to hang the pack from the tripod.

Now though, Digipower has come up with a unique solution to the external-battery dilemma, in the process creating the most universal external pack to date. With the provided cables and adapters, it can power just about any consumer or prosumer-level camera out there, something no pack to date has managed to achieve. The new battery pack is called the DPS-9000, and is overall one of the slickest external power solutions


Performance

In a word, excellent. Although it had some trouble with the Dimage 7, the DSP-9000 worked beautifully with all the other digicams I tried it with. I didn't do any sort of an exhaustive test, but a half-dozen different cameras from as many different manufactures all worked flawlessly.

I don't routinely do any sort of capacity testing for external battery packs, but the DSP-9000 certainly seems to pack a punch. As an informal test, I ran a Nikon 5700 from it until it ran out of juice, with the camera set to its worst-case power consumption mode. (Capture mode, with the rear-panel LCD screen on.) Even with the camera running in its worst-case power mode, the DPS-9000 kept the camera running for nearly four hours. (!) This was an excellent performance, a good bit beyond my expectations for the unit.

I also found the little "gas gauge" LEDs on the side of the unit quite useful - As the test wore on, progressively fewer lights lit, giving me a pretty good idea of how much charge was remaining.

Bottom Line

This looks like a real winner to me - I really like the way the DPS-9000 just bolts onto the camera's tripod socket. This seemed much more convenient than the belt-mounted packs I've used in the past, although it does add a fair bit to the weight of the camera. I also liked how versatile it was - It's big news indeed that there's finally an external power pack that will fit Sony digicams and camcorders, welcome relief to serious Sony shooters. It worked well with every camera I tried it on, with the exception of the Minolta Dimage 7. Also, while I don't have any formal basis of comparison for battery pack capacity, the DPS-9000 powered typical digicams for a long time.

Finding One

Digipower tells me that the DPS-9000 should be appearing in national photo and electronics chains like Ritz Camera, CompUSA and Best Buy soon. See the shopping links below.



Keywords:Minolta Dimage 7, the DSP-9000,worst-case power mode, digital cameras , camcorders,cables and adapters, external-battery dilemma,Nikon 5700