A65 Vertical Grip? YES

kolibri wrote: always lovely and appreciative to see the DIY the setup reminds me of the dicain 3rd party VG for the km5d

In fact this grip works quite well with my KM5d as well.

4GibMe wrote: I like it when people think outside the box, nicely done. Cheers

Thanks.

Many people have commented that I think WAY outside the box.

It is amazing what you can accomplished if you are cheap.   

Regards,

He used the wire from a wired remote like this one.

Okay, so I tried some tinkering of my own with Meike's a500/550 vertical grip. Looks like I was able to come up with Sony a65 Vertical Grip.

As you can see, the battery door is the only thing in the way at this point






So here, I marked the blocked area with a blue color pencil so I could eventually cut it out


I started with a burr attachment on my Drummel Tool


I eventually had to remove the screws and take it apart to further remove unnecessary plastic



As you can see, I had to remove quite a bit


Once I finalized all the removal, I vacuumed it out with a shop vac and put it back together. I soon found out that the screw attachment didn't match up with the a65 screw mount. So I had to remove the turn dial screw connection from the vertical grip. I dropped a battery in and it's been working fine since. The connection is very snug and doesn't need to be secured with a screw attachment. I took the grip and shook it vigorously and it won't budge unless you grab both the camera and grip and pull them apart.


This was an extensive modification and I don't expect anyone to copy it. Still in all, it was fun tinkering around.

Edited by rms180 - 28 January 2012 at 04:12

Looking at the dimensions and battery placement,, It looks like the a100 vertical grip would have the best fit on an a57 or a65

I bet , if you could find an old 3rd party a100 grip i bet it would fit perfectly.
The old a100 grips had a door slot and a shutter cable.

They probably have a power cord that plugs into the camera external power socket. That means you have to have TWO cords running from the grip to the camera.
For me one cord is enough. If I need to switch batteries, it is not that big of a deal to remove the grip and change them. I can still hold two batteries in the grip, they just don't power anything. Holding area only.

Sony just needed to put the connection in the battery compartment, and all of the messing around would have been easy. But they wanted differentiate the 65 from the 77.

You can poke away but the horse, or Sony in this case, won't feel a thing.

Blame the marketing department, they differentiate enough that those with the cash will not be persuaded against the more expensive model and on the other hand, leave enough features to persuade the financially challenged or the bargain hunters that the cheaper model will do the job. If they have done a good job, the cheaper model will leave the purchaser almost satisfied but still hankering after the top model. Then they get two sales, but not for the price of one.

My advice is to buy the top model now (borrow or lie to the Wife if necessary), that way there will no lingering dissatisfaction, no excuse not to go out and take photographs and no loss when you finally persuade yourself that you really have to have that top model.