Saturday, November 12, 2011

X100 – Review Part 6 – What were they thinking with that charger design?

I have been swamped with work (working until 2 or 3 am three times last week, and up for early calls several times) and with the kitchen renovation, so when I finally had some time and went to shoot some images with the X100, the battery was naturally dead :-)

So this morning, I dug the charger out of the box in which Fuji sent the camera and proceeded to find a free plug and then to insert the battery. And nothing happened. Turns out the battery is loose. WTF?

So a quick Google search turned up this diagram of an adapter that is shipped with the charger to make it suitable for this battery. And that sucker falls out a lot, the standard fix being super glue.

Now, far be it from me to tell Fuji their business, but when you charge $1100 for a fixed focal camera, it is more typical to send a custom charger that does not have this flaw.

I’m not going to even bother to search for the adapter, assuming it is still around somewhere. I used a chunk of paper folded up, which works just fine. On the left is the insertion point of the paper, on the right are the contacts that are now in contact with the other contacts … i.e. meeting their contactual obligations hyuk hyuk hyuk …