760(and related) AC Pack Pin-Out

At the moment, I'm trying to get my DCS 760c going again. I bought this camera a few years ago as a complete kit(in the nice big cardboard box) including two batteries.

Unfortunately, in a move, the box with the charger, AC pack, and spare battery ended up in storage while the camera itself and one battery ended up with the rest of my cameras.

As it sits now, without a big trek to a storage unit that I need desperately to clean out, I just have the camera itself and one battery.

I've been trying to charge the one battery I have with a bench PSU. I remember it working okay, or at least well enough to get a few shots off, although I know it probably needs a rebuild. I'll look at that one later(or get a few of the third party ones that seem available). I can get it to 8.7V overnight at 50mA(or actually if I set my PSU to 8.7V and 50mA, it will go to ~20mA after an hour or so sitting at 8.7V), but it will die pretty quickly in the camera. I'm going to try a few more charges and see if I can recondition before writing this one off completely.

In the mean time, I'm wondering about using it around the house/studio with a bench PSU. The connector looks simple enough with just a 3 pin mini-DIN, and I know Quantum made a pig tail to run these cameras off one of their packs. I seem to remember the power supply being a generic looking brick that just had "POWER SUPPLY" or something like that splashed across the front in big letters

I've looked but I can't find the pinout published anywhere on the web for this. Does anyone have it?

Hi,

I just happen to have one handy.

And a cell phone cam comes in handy once again. :)

Stan

Wonderful! thank you and it worked perfectly once I remembered to invert it left to right for the female part of the plug!

Hi,

Ha! Yeah. Been there and done that. I didn't get a T Shirt. And my wife is a screenprinter! :P

I should design one that says Flip the Flipping Pinout Male v Female

Very few would get it, though!

I actually had remembered the voltage and which pin was which. I grabbed the end to snap a pic and turned the brick over in the process. And there it all was on the label!

Stan

And on another note, it seems as though my battery may have "woken up" some after a bit of use.

On initial charge, I popped it in and the camera flickered to life. I went through and set the time and did several things, but wasn't able to get a shot off before the camera shut off(and I don't mean gave me a low battery warning-I mean the LCD started flickering and then went dead).

I charged a second time, and in there also was able to power up the camera by external power and left it in for a few hours, hoping to charge the internal clock battery. That seems to have worked, BTW, although of course the date tops out at 2020!

My second charge let me get about a dozen shots. That was using an AF-S lens with VR, so I was hitting the F5 end of the camera decently hard, and also did an image review. Everything was still functioning when it finally came up and said "battery too low to take photo."

A third charge, and I've managed about 40 shots with the battery still reading full. I'm sure I probably won't get the rated 300 or however many it is, but even 100 would be great(particularly if I can find my other battery).

I have to say I like almost everything about this camera better than I do the 14/n and SLR/n. Maybe I've become a snob since I usually use flagship or second tier bodies(my current main kit is centered around a D850, supplemented by either a D810 or D5 as the situation warrants) but I really just don't enjoy using the N80 based cameras that much. My Fuji S3 became a shelf queen after I got the S5 for the same reason.

Of course the F5 is just a beast in general. I actually rarely use my film F5, deferring instead to either the F4 for better manual focus lens compatibility(although I like the F2 better on the whole for that) or the F6 for refinement but the F5 is still king in a lot of ways. It's such an enjoyable body to use, and it's a real testament to how great of a design it was that I can basically seamless move between the F5 and the 20-year newer D5(ignoring how much more stuff the D5 does, but also noticing how similar they feel in my hands).

As the 760 goes, for some reason it just feels like so much more of a polished camera than the DCS 14/n or SLR/n, though. Startup time seems similar to the SLR/n, but the menus to me are easier to navigate(even though I realize there are fewer settings in the 760). The LCD just feels a lot cleaner and easier to read too. The image output is certainly respectable, too, and even in my quick playing with it(in Lightroom-I haven't looked at them in Photodesk yet) the files seem to look great offhand. It's a shame we never got a higher resolution and/or possibly full frame version of this sensor in this body.

Hi,

NiMH cells will respond to cycling. Charge at a low rate for a bit on a lab bench supply then load it down to discharge. I like to use a Hi Q Industrial battery conditioner for this sort of work but that's because I have a couple of them from my Ericsson days. The 760 will do just fine for a load though.

Of course, you still probably need new cells, but you should get by via this method to evaluate the camera.

I am still using my 760c with the Chimney Finder with macro lenses on a copy stand as a 'wide field' microscope to document failed electronics. And I'm still using my 520c on a Leica microscope for close up views of damage. This makes use of the easily swapped viewfinders and focusing screens of the F5, something no other digital camera has.

That's making use of older equipment long paid for. There are other options if I were buying new equipment today, of course. As it is, I have this stuff and my clients care not what I shoot the pics with. Just that they can see what's gone wrong with their products this time. ;)

Stan

Missing my signature here:

Amateur Photographer
Professional electronics development engineer

I was looking in a seldom-used camera bag today and couldn't figure out what the heavy object in the bottom of it was. I dug a bit and it seems as though I'd stuck my other battery in this one for whatever reason.

It came up .5V when I first checked it, so I threw it on my improvised "charger." It came up to 2V relatively quickly, but about 4 hours later is at 5.72V charging at 100mA. That gives me high hopes for this one since it seems to be letting me stuff a fair few electrons into it.

Once it gets to 7.2V I'll drop it to 50mA and leave it another 8 hours or so. Hopefully it will come up to 8.70V in that time(that's the voltage I've been setting my bench PSU to, and I stop charging when I start seeing it switch over to CV mode and the current drop).