dabhand16
Pixalo Crew
Registered: June 2006
Location: Dunstable Bedfordshire UK
Posts: 23899
|
|
Review Date: Sun August 5, 2012
|
Would you recommend the product? Yes |
Price you paid?: £26.50
| Rating: 10
|
|
Pros:
|
Value for money, focus point selection better than Nikon, comfortable in use
|
|
Cons:
|
Build quality - but no impact in use - see review
|
|
Link Delight Battery Grip for Nikon D700/D300s/D300
Nikon MB-D10 verses Meike verses Link Delight battery grips
I’ve recently gone from not having a battery grip to now having three! Part one of the story is in this review of the Meike battery grip. Briefly, I bought a Nikon MB-D10 battery grip for my D700 and I was well pleased with it. This prompted me to look for another grip for my D300. I know that the MB-D10 will fit either body, but in the (rare) event of my wanting to use both cameras with grips simultaneously, I thought that I’d get a cheap one from e-bay. There is no shortage of battery grips on e-bay, but some only take 6 batteries in the AA carrier (the Nikon one takes 8), others accept 2 EL-EN3e batteries but don’t accept AA’s and some come with cloned batteries too. Others have a remote control for the shutter release. Some come with the extra gubbins needed to use the EL-EN4 batteries (an extra with the £240 Nikon grip!) and some don’t. Some don’t have a rubberised grip area on the back where your thumb rests. Careful scrutiny of the images of the products will reveal those ones with rubberised grip areas as you can see the line of the rubber insert, but I suppose that if in doubt an e-mail to the seller will settle the question. I thought that the Meike grip with its built-in LCD time lapse timer, IR remote control and long exposure facility as well as showing the date and time offered great value at £43.34. I should mention here that Meike also make grips without the timer feature that appear to replicate the Nikon/Link Delight design and appearance. I’ve seen them for about £55.
I was pretty happy with the Meike grip, but thought that I’d try the Link Delight one in order to satisfy my curiosity. It was, after all, one of the cheapest grips out there – almost half of the price of the Meike. Some time ago Rob Barron researched a grip for his 5DmkII and ended up with a Link Delight grip. The price had gone up a bit since my last search but at £26.50 I was not moaning. Communications from the seller were excellent and I received the grip at the shorter end of the delivery estimates.
So how does it stack up against the £240 Nikon and the £45 Meike models? Pretty well, I’d say. Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first. This grip is plastic, as is the Meike. The Nikon is (I believe) the same magnesium construction as the D700 body and so will be stronger and possibly weatherproof too, although I’m not sure that I’d trust the join between the camera and grip as being weatherproof, or the attachment wheel and battery chamber cover. It weighs in at 230g without a battery but with the battery carrier. This is less than the Meike grip (260g) and much less than the Nikon one (280g) and must surely point towards a lighter construction. However, in use this is not noticeable and the only potential issue I’d highlight is that if like me you have a camera strap that uses the tripod thread to secure it to the camera, or carry the camera mounted on a tripod, the tripod thread in the grip is probably not as strong as the Nikon grip or the one in the camera body. The internal strengthening bar that runs the length of the grip and provides support for the tripod thread attachment is metal and the same width as in the Nikon, but if the body of the grip is plastic rather than metal, it cannot be as strong, can it? However, if you are not going to stress the tripod thread by using it as a strap attachment point, or carry the camera attached to a tripod, will this actually matter? This is not saying that you could not use the gripped camera on a tripod. Conventional use on a tripod would not stress the tripod thread like hanging the weight of the camera and lens on it would.
This is the only thing that I can adversely comment on. The rest is all good news. It even comes with an EL-4 battery chamber cover. The rubberised surfaces are the same as you will find on the Nikon grip extending from the front finger grip, all around the base and on the back edge and thumb grip. It offers the same feel as the Nikon grip. The thumb recess is the same size and shape as the Nikon and fits my small hand better than the smaller thumb recess that is required to accommodate the timer in the Meike. The Nikon controls are exactly replicated on the Link Delight grip with one exception. Grease Spot mentioned in his excellent review of the Nikon MB-D10 battery grip that he found the joypad that moves the focus point around to be stiff and he is virtually unable to move the focus point diagonally. I’d agree with him. My MB-D10 is the same. However, both the Meike and Link Delight grips have a very slightly longer ‘joystick’ and a lighter spring which makes moving the focus point very easy – even diagonally. They are both far more precise as a result than the Nikon. I’d go as far as to say that I prefer the Meike and Link Delight grips in this very important respect. There is a recess for storing the ‘L’ shaped rubber plug that covers the camera contacts that all grips appear to have, but nowhere to keep the contacts cover for the grip. This missing feature is also shared by other grips too, so it seems. I guess that it is expected that the grip will be permanently attached to the camera, where I’m only intending to use it when shooting portraits or models in a studio. The switch that surrounds the shutter release works the opposite way to the main camera power switch which is a bit annoying. The Nikon grip is the same, as is the Meike. However, this is not a power switch. The camera power switch is the only power on/off. The switch on the grip simply allows you to turn off the grip controls when you are using the camera in landscape orientation to avoid accidentally releasing the shutter or changing settings with the thumb wheels.
In my other review I gave the Meike grip a 9/10, and I’ll stand by that score. I’ve scored this grip 10/10 in spite of it having fewer features, as the value for money is astonishing. As I said in my other review, the difference between the Meike grip with a timer (and maybe other makes with timers too) and Link Delight will come down to a more comfortable feel for some v more features. The areas where I’ve made adverse comments on the Meike and Link Delight grips will, I’m sure, not affect the real world performance for the average user. My adverse comments on the focus selector on the Nikon grip however will affect most people. You could argue that at the prices these things cost you could buy both third party ones and have the best of both worlds and still have only paid less than 1/3 of the price of the Nikon grip.
There are other grips available at various price points, and some made by the more popular third party makes such as Hahnel and Phottix, as mentioned by Grease Spot. It might well be that the more expensive grips from the recognised makers are of better quality and they are still much cheaper than the OE branded items, but the weight, which I think is a good measure of the build quality and strength, is not given on the Phottix web site. Hahnel show their grip as weighing 280g, the same as the Nikon grip. Having deliberately picked the Link Delight grip as being one of the cheapest on the market I would suggest that you can’t go far wrong with an e-bay grip. Just be aware that some will not accept the same number of AA batteries as the OE ones. This might not be important as I think that the only downsides will be that the camera will not reach its maximum potential frame rate, and the AA batteries might not last as long. Having said that, I went for one that could accept the same number of AA batteries as the Nikon grip.
To sum up the Nikon wins on strength and possibly weatherproofing, the others win on value for money, focus point selection and features. In the real world I think that the vast majority of people will be more than happy with an e-bay battery grip and will have around £200 more in the bank too. I’ve decided to sell the Meike grip as for me the better comfort of the Link Delight one outweighs the timer functionality and remote control. I toyed with the idea of keeping all three but in reality I can’t see myself using the timer and remote control much, if at all. So just as I said in my Meike v Nikon MB-D10 review, if you are not going to get two grips so you have all of the features, the decision is between the extra functions verses better comfort. That is not to say that the Meike one is uncomfortable, just that the Nikon and Link Delight ones are better for me. My big decision now is whether to sell the Nikon grip and get another Link delight one. It really is that good. I’ll be comparing them in use to see if I can adapt to the Nikon’s focus point selector or if my usage really needs the better build quality.
|
|
Pixalo Photography Community
