NEW! PolaVolt How-to: The cheapest & best i-Type Battery mod for SX-70 cameras!

Essential info: uses two 3.7V '10440' lithium ion cells (same shape and size as a regular AAA but different voltage) batteries are hard cell and user replaceable in the field requires external charger such as the BH-042100-04U to recharge the batteries batteries will last 10-30 packs of film depending on the quality of battery and specifics of the camera model no switches required! simply erect the camera to turn it on, and collapse the camera to turn it off keep camera collapsed when not in use to prevent battery draining to 0V when the batteries are getting low, the camera will begin to sound sluggish, alerting you to change your batteries I recommend re-charging them every 8 or so packs of film if you want to be conservative user replaceable cells mean you can carry spares into the field! despite some doubts in this older video, this solution does works perfectly on a 680 due to shipping regulations I cannot supply batteries, but they are easy to find on eBay, Amazon, Aliexpress etc as tempting as they are, do NOT use the batteries with built in USB-C charging inside the cell itself. They are only 2/3 the capacity of a standard 10440 and have built in surge protection that will shut the batteries off if too many amps are drawn. This results in poor performance ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you are a technician offering such a service commercially, please credit it as being invented by The Instant Camera Guy. This is all I ask :) Like what I do? Find this video helpful or entertaining? Feel free to buy me a beer (or two!): https://ko-fi.com/theinstantcameraguy Getting artifacts in the video? For best quality, manually select 1080p quality, as depending on your bandwidth, YouTube may default to 720p - and YouTube's 720p compression looks like garbage ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Previous PolaVolt videos:    • The Cheapest (And Best?) SX-70 i-Type powe...      • HOW TO: Wire up the PolaVolt i-Type Batter...   Parts list: your SX-70! 1x enclosed 2xAAA battery holder 2x AAA sized '10440' 3.7V lithium ion batteries (350mAh or so) 1x mini buck converter good quality solder and soldering iron heat shrink kapton tape automotive body moulding tape 1x 3.7V lithium ion battery charger Optional: 1x 0805 size SMD resistor around 45K to 47K in value (outputting 6.05 to 6.2V respectively on buck converters using a MP2307 chip. Note that bucks based on other chips may need different resistor values, and if you are unsure you should ALWAYS check the output voltage before finishing wiring it up) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Like all battery adapters on the market, it has it's pros and cons, but the price is right! Pros: uses entirely off-the-shelf components very powerful compact simple design, with no built in charging circuitry to fail, all charging happens externally hard cell battery design means batteries are user-replaceable and field-replaceable automatic darkslide eject is disabled cheap! battery lasts for many many packs of film. I'd recommend topping up the batteries after 10-15 packs. Cons: yes, it still adds 'bulk' like the other battery adapters do, but is one of the most compact solutions possible kinda ugly? But also not really. Its very neat for what it is this mod is not really the kind of thing the average user can install, but easy for a technician like me to do while I'm overhauling the camera on strap-lug models such as the Alpha and Sonars, the right strap lug is very SLIGHTLY obscured, making it SLIGHTLY harder to attach a strap. Please note that you MUST get the 10440 cell that looks EXACTLY like a AAA. With one protruding and and one flat end. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chapters: 00:15 - Intro 01:30 - What is a PolaVolt? 02:22 - PolaVolt vs other i-Type adapters 05:11 - A message to technicians. If you are going to copy me, do it properly! 08:58 - What you need 15:30 - Disabling auto eject 18:23 - Removing battery terminals 20:22 - Modifying the ribbon cable 32:37 - An optional step 35:00 - Modifying and fitting the bottom body panel 43:25 - Forgot to mention... You need to mod the battery holder 45:35 - Prepping the buck converter 46:34 - Soldering in the buck converter 50:45 - Installing the buck converter 54:41 - The finished camera -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   / instantcameraguy     / theinstantcameraguy