Phase One IQ4 USB C Charging in the field

One of my favorite places to visit in the US is the desert of California.  I find it amazing that one state can have so many terrains within a short drive.  CA is truly a photographer’s dream in many ways.   This year I had the chance to finally take the new Phase One IQ4 150mp Achromatic into the field to learn how to use it properly.  We have had many units arrive in Atlanta but go right back out to customers.   But this Achromatic was finally one that I could call mine and put into our demo stock…… and I selfishly grabbed it as soon as it arrived at the office.

As a business owner and a salesman as well, I don’t get enough chances to use the gear in the field.   Importantly, I think the only way to truly know how any piece of gear works is to find out where it excels and where it fails in areas where it will be used by your clients.   Therefore, I make sure our whole team can sign out any and all of our gear in the office in order to take it for vacation or for the weekends so they can properly learn to troubleshoot.  You truly learn a product when you spend days with it at a national park rather than an hour in the studio.  The field testing is invaluable to our support staff and this is one of the perks of working at Capture Integration.  On Friday afternoons you will often hear our team call “dibs” on gear as if they were yelling “shotgun” to get the front seat of a car as we did as children.  Just now, instead of getting the front seat of the car, they are grabbing the latest 150mp digital back…  🙂

So while I started to use some of the new features of the IQ4 and its latest firmware update, such as Live View auto gain and XF power sharing, it really was one of the original features that stood out on this trip for me.  Brad Kaye handed me a small pouch in Atlanta and said “try this out in Joshua Tree”.  And of course, everyone knows I listen and do what I am told, (right Christine Gallagher?) so I pulled that mystery pouch out of my bag and plugged it in.  Take a look at the quick video I took while shooting:

Yes, he handed me a 26,800mAh USB C portable charger.   And by simply plugging it into the USB C port on the IQ4 150mp, I was able to gain the equivalent of 10 batteries in my camera at once.  Adding to my 6,800mAh,(2 Phase One Batteries) I now had an astounding 33,600mAh 20,400mAh of power at my disposal.

(Edit 4/24: An observant client pointed out to us that mAh, [milli-amp-hours] is a rating based on a specific voltage, and the 26,800mAh rating of the battery wasn’t relevant at the 7.2v needs of the system.  The easier math here is that a Phase One stock battery is 25Wh [watt hour] and the USB C portable charger is 99Wh, so it’s 4x the capacity of a stock battery.  -BK)

The video shows the power bank charging my current batteries in my Phase One XF system.   This virtually eliminated the need for any of the batteries I carried in my backpack.   Furthermore,  when the other fine gentlemen who were shooting with me asked if I had any charged batteries because theirs had run out, I was happily able to say “sure, you can have one of mine, I don’t need them”.

The battery Dave is using here is the RAVPower 26800mAh ‘Super-C Series’ Portable Charger.  There are many versions of these sort of batteries, but what’s important to look for before purchasing is that it can deliver power not just to portable and iOS devices but also to a MacBook Pro laptop.  

This particular unit has a USB-C In/Out port on it in addition to the twin USB-A ports.  

USB-C is the only port that can deliver the requisite power to the IQ4, and also provides quick re-charging through the same port by plugging your MacBook Pro brick directly into it. 

Nothing that the enduser needs to do to turn this on,  just plug in the C to C cable and it just works.   -BK