British manufacturer Hawkwoods has just announced the development of an interesting battery solution that is designed to make powering your camera on a rig much easier. Traditionally if you wanted a battery to power your camera, recorder, light, EVF or monitor you would opt for a V-lock or AB-type brick battery with an adapter plate to mount it to your rig. These can be heavy and cumbersome. In many cases they make the rig quite top heavy as the centre of gravity is raised up, or elongated if the battery is laid flat on a plate. Some users drop their battery plate down below the rig but this makes the setup harder to set down on the floor.
The Hawkwoods Gripper li-ion batteries series solve all these problems by doing away with extra plates. The batteries sit directly onto 15mm rods with no additional clamps or brackets. The casing is made of high impact ABS material. The batteries come in three capacities – 75Wh, 100Wh and 150Wh – and are relatively compact. Each has two D-tap connectors as standard and an LED fuel gauge that clearly shows the status of the battery.
If you want to run more than two devices Hawkwoods make a special power distribution adapter that can turn a single D-tap into either four D-taps, or two D-taps plus two Hirose connectors.
These look to be great option if you need the extra power but want to keep your rig as compact as possible. The only thing that is lacking compared to some other power distribution systems is a 5V USB output. Also, remember that if you want to run a DSLR or other 7.2V or 9V device then you will need an adapter cable with the appropriate voltage down-conversion.
There is no word on pricing for these batteries yet, or any indication of when they are likely to be available. For more details keep an eye on the Hawkwoods website.
