dabhand16
Pixalo Crew
Registered: June 2006
Location: Dunstable Bedfordshire UK
Posts: 23883
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Review Date: Wed July 18, 2012
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Would you recommend the product? Yes |
Price you paid?: £43.34
| Rating: 9
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Pros:
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Price, features, value, focus point selection better than Nikon
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Cons:
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Build quality and finish - not a deal breaker - see review
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Meike LCD Battery Grip v Nikon MB-D10
I’ve never wanted a battery grip. Battery life has never been a problem for me and the extra weight and bulk they add to the camera was always a put-off. It was fair to say that the majority of my pictures were taken in landscape orientation too. However, some of you might have noticed that recently I’ve been using portrait orientation rather a lot!
While I did not find using the camera in portrait orientation difficult or uncomfortable, there appeared to be a good case for the convenience of the alternative control set enabling a relatively conventional hold on the camera while in portrait orientation.
Casually browsing around, I clicked on the MPB Photographic link on the Forums Home Page and found that they had a Nikon MB-D10 battery grip in Exl++ condition listed at £139. That is a decent saving over a new one, and as I’d not treated myself for a while, a few clicks later I’d bought it. It would also fit on the D700 and the D300 – bonus! I felt that nice and warm satisfaction smug glow.
Then I had another thought. What happens if I want to use both cameras on a shoot when I would be using portrait orientation for most of the shots? Easy. I’ll get a cheap grip from e-bay, but which one? A quick look revealed some that only took six batteries in the AA carrier where the Nikon one holds eight. Some came with cloned batteries too. Then I remembered that a while back Rob Barron wanted a grip for his 5D2, so I did a quick search and found his thread. ChrisH had recommended the Mieke that he paid £79 for, ‘98% as good as the Canon at a fraction of the price’. Rob eventually went for the Link Delight grip after doing some research, so with these two stalwarts of Pixalo recommending these two grips this seemed to be the way to go.
First I searched for the Link Delight one and found them with no problems. £24. Bargain, or what? (Edit: I have now bought a Link Delight grip too and have reviewed it here) Now I was not expecting the cheapie to be as well finished as the Nikon product, and I guessed that one area where they would cut corners would be on the rubberised grip areas. The Nikon has them on the front and back of the grip where you, well, grip it! Of course I was not going to be fooled by the pictures that showed a grained effect. Plastic can be grained very easily as those of us who owned old cars with plastic fascias can testify. A search on Meike saw prices around the £55 mark. An indication of better quality? Not necessarily for an old cynic like me. So now I was faced with two apparently identical grips with a 100% price differential. I did further searches on Google and found another link to e-bay. This one was also a Meike, but it had another feature – an LCD display that was a clock that showed the time and date and had a built-in timer, plus a remote control!! The price of this grip? £43.34 delivered. I decided that with the extra features this one seemed to be the one to go for, so I bought it too.
So what are the differences between the Nikon at £240-ish new and the Meike at £44? Well I was right to suspect that the rubberised surface would be confined to the front of the grip. The base is also rubberised, but not the back where your thumb rests, or the edge of the grip where the ball of the thumb rests. All of the controls are there exactly like the Nikon and they work just as well. The joystick that controls the focus point is a little longer on the Meike grip, it protrudes a little more and it is easier to move having a milder return spring. This makes the Meike joystick easier to to move the focus point around and it is more precise. The switch that surrounds the shutter release button works the opposite way to the one on the camera - that is on both grips, but it is not a power on/off switch. That remains the main switch on the camera. The switch on both grips is merely an on/off for the grip controls so when using the camera in landscape orientation, you can turn off the grip controls to prevent accidental shutter release or changing settings.
The clock and timer took a while to work out. The instructions translated from Chinese did not make any sense and it took a Google search to find my salvation. What was not obvious were the timer functions. Delay, Long and Intvl. Well, I managed to work put what Intvl was, and the instructions helpfully told me how to adjust the various parameters, but not what the functions did. Thanks to Google I now know that delay refers to the time that will elapse before your programme will initiate. Long is how long the exposure will be, and although I’ve not tested this function, it seems that exposures of up to several hours can be made. Intvl is the time between exposures for time-lapse photography. These functions can be set to any time up to several hours. You can also enter the number of exposures to be taken up to 999. The one thing that I did not work out for myself is that the delay and long functions have to have a numerical value set in them. If you set ‘0’, nothing works, so a nominal value of 1 has to be entered. There is a backlight and lock for the clock and timer controls too. The Meike also comes with a spare button battery which I assume will fit in the remote control or the LCD timer in the grip. No, you don’t have to have a camera battery in the grip to power up the timer. More good news.
So what is it like in use? I’ve only fired off a few shots with both grips so far and to be honest, the Nikon edges it in the comfort stakes due to the better grip surfaces and a slightly bigger scalloped recess where your thumb rests. That is not to say that the Meike is uncomfortable, just that the Nikon is better. I think this is more to do with my small hands and the smaller thumb recess on the Meike grip than anything else. If my hands were bigger, I might not have written the last sentence. Weight is pretty much the same at 280g for the Nikon and 260g for the Meike - without batteries. The battery handling facilities are the same. They both have a recess that you can put the rubber contacts cover from the camera in for safe keeping, but not anywhere to keep the plastic contacts cover from the grip itself.
One thing I’m going to watch out for is that I use the Quick Rapid camera strap that uses the tripod thread to accept a fitting that the strap is attached to. Now I have no reservations about the strength of the tripod thread in the camera bodies, but the thread in the grips could be a different story. I believe that the Nikon grip is made from magnesium and looking at the fitting it does look stronger. Not only is the case stronger, there is a metal re-enforcement that runs the length of the base that the tripod thread fitting is secured to. You must get something for the extra £200! I bet that the Meike is made from plastic and has a different fitting. It does have a similar re-enforcing strip that supports the tripod thread fitting though. How strong are they? I don’t know, but I’ll probably won’t be using the strap when the grip is on the camera, and on the odd occasions when I do, I will be very conscious of the potential strain on the fitting. The other thing is that I believe that the Nikon one is weatherproof as are the cameras, but I bet the Meike one is not.
So to sum up, the Nikon grip is more comfortable (for me), the Meike grip wins in focus point selection and features. The Nikon is probably weatherproof and stronger. I wonder if it is the addition of the clock and timer that has dictated the smaller thumb recess on the Meike grip. Bear in mind that Meike and other makes also sell grips without timers so if this is the case, perhaps the choice between better comfort and the timer features could decide the grip choice for those who do not want to spend money on the main branded ones. In that senario only you can decide where your priorities lie, but do bear in mind my observations are based on my small hands and if you have bigger hands this might not be an issue for you.
Best value? You don’t need to ask really do you? The big question is are the various makes available on e-bay as good as each other, or do you get what you pay for?
Part two of this saga is here Link Delight battery grip for Nikon D700/D300s/D300
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