By site editor Dan Chung:
We have previously featured the lovely Kinogrip wooden handgrips on Newsshooter. Styled like the handgrips of yesteryear, they are handmade in the USA by Ray Thomas and come in different styles to fit a range of cameras.
The Sony a7S has become an overnight success story and many shooters have started to rig the diminutive camera to be used on the shoulder. To allow the use of their wooden handgrips with the a7S Kinogrip have come out with an IR adapter that controls the trigger of the a7S. It is housed in a small box that can be attached to a rig by means of a 15mm rod clamp or 1/4-20 thread. The IR adapter is powered by a single CR2032 button battery and I’m told that once set up it should function as reliably as a wired trigger.
I asked Ray to explain how it works and also why he went for an IR solution over one that uses Sony’s dedicated Multi connector:
“A little info on the A7S trigger box and why I went with an IR solution rather than a hard wired one. First is cost. The IR box was an existing design that was easily adapted to the A7S. This allows me to keep the cable cost down. A built from scratch wired option would have put individual cable cost close to $200 (about $85 of that for the raw Sony Multi connector). Second is reliability. Normally I would prefer a hard wired solution but the Multi connector is basically a mini-USB (with some extra pins added by Sony) and IMHO is not the most robust of connections. In my testing I found the IR receiver on the A7S to be wonderfully sensitive and I tried several positions for the IR transmitter box – it was dead reliable. Never failed to fire. I had a similar setup on a Canon DSLR and it was finicky about transmitter placement.
“The IR transmitter is a simple piece of kit. It’s just a 1.25″ X 1″ X .5″ black box with a 2.5mm cable port. A short pigtail cable plugs from the grip to the box. Standard cable length will be 8” but the customer can specify longer or shorter lengths if needed (at no extra charge). The box has an attached 15mm spud to make mounting easy. I use an off the shelf 90 deg. rod clamp to attach it to my rig. It also has a 1/4-20 tapped hole if one prefers to mount it that way. The box can be left on the rig permanently. The 2.5mm plug is much more durable than the Multi connector for repeated plugging and unplugging. Once set up it works just like a wired connection. Everything is powered by a user replaceable CR2032 button battery. The battery should provide thousands of actuations before needing replacement.”
Also new from Kinogrip is a new walnut version of their Grenoble grip which we have featured previously. It is modelled on the old Aaton handgrip and looks very nice.
Pricing will be $120 for an individual a7S IR box with pigtail cable and $499 as part of a grip package. For more details visit the Kinogrip website.
