A cable question

[Pantoned]

My ZD is on service because firewire connection has stopped working. I've been trying to find out a solution on how to hold the firewire cable correctly with the camera for quite some time now. On hands the camera is more like a Canon than a medium format camera+DB so I usually hold it a lot instead of keeping it on the tripode. This causes a lot of pressure on the connection of the cable with the camera which makes the cable fall often as there isn't any "strong enough" thing that holds the cable with the camera. When looking in the firewire plug on the camera, there are a couple of small holes that look as if some kind of cable would stick there, like it happens with ethernet cables for example. I searched around internet and couldn't find anything at all, only thing I found were corner cables which should adapt better to the side of the camera. The other day I was thinking that the best solution would be an "Apple magsafe-like" cable, strong enough to stick but that could be automatically detached in case of accident. The ZD plug zone is made of iron or something similar and a magnet would stick perfectly to it. Even this, and supposing I would be able to make a homemade-one, I'm not sure if the magnetic field would affect in anyway the camera or the cable signal, any idea?

How does  Leaf/Hass/Phase/Canon shooters out there solve the problem? It's a matter of not moving the camera a lot and keeping it with the tripode or there are solutions for these other brands? Any help would be very welcomed.

BTW there is the new english 1.3 version of Mamiya DPS to download on Mamiya website, basically adds Universal Binary support for Intel macs.


Happy new year to everyone.

Regards.
Arnau

[David WM]

Hi Arnau,

Have a look at what Kodak designed for this problem.

http://www.kodak.com/global/en/service/pro...b/tib7087.jhtml

David

[Pantoned]

Thank you very much for the link, even if Kodak must have stop the production and the cable end is not universal compatible, the "Cable Clamp Assembly" piece is a great idea, maybe  Manfrotto or someone else have a similar product that can be mounted to the tripod at the same time, I'll have a look.  I hope that some years ahead we'll see fast wireless SD cards that gets completely rid of the cables; that would be the best solution.

Thanks again for your help.

Arnau

[erikhillard]

We have found that with some "looser" cables and digital backs that a small piece of tape around the cable end thickens it just enough to hold the cable in the camera.  Not a high tech fix by any means but it worked very well on older Phase backs.