Camera not powering up. P-tap mounted wrong way round.

M

Marcel Zyskind

Member
Unfortunately I've had a mishap with a P-Tap mounted the wrong way on the v-mount plate today. Looks like there is no fuse on the v-mount plate. Is there an internal fuse in the camera somewhere? Camera is not powering up. Need help asap. I'm shooting in the Dominican Republic.
 
I guess I should mention that this is the Varicam LT camera and that it was a smallhd monitor which was attached the wrong way around.

Marcel Zyskind said:
Unfortunately I've had a mishap with a P-Tap mounted the wrong way on the v-mount plate today. Looks like there is no fuse on the v-mount plate. Is there an internal fuse in the camera somewhere? Camera is not powering up. Need help asap. I'm shooting in the Dominican Republic.
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Which V mount plate are you using? Then my other question, how did you mount it the wrong way?

As for the LT, if it is the camera and your V mount plate has no P tap fuse, it's going to have to go into the shop. Unfortunately they don't have a user accessible fuse.
 
When I bought the camera it came with a Ikan v-mount plate. The ptap on the side of it has a rather big hole and I put the tap in reversed.

Thanks for getting back.
 
That sucks. Sounds like the same design flaw in the 27F VariCam(or at least the early 27F's). Instead of a user resettable circuit breaker, it had a non-user accessible fuse. Great design.
 
That is not the standard battery mount for the camera. Contact your local Panasonic service center. Turnaround can be fairly quick and they may be able to help you locate gear in the meantime.
 
Hi Mitch,

Is New York the best place to send it if I'm shooting in the Dominican Republic at the moment? Santo Domingo Panasonic service center is in the future.

Cheers
Marcel
 
The future is here! I take my words back. There was a Panasonic center in Santo Domingo and they've swapped out the fuse, camera is up and running again! Thank you.
 
The ubiquitious p-tap (aka PowerTap or D-tap) is a connector that should have died off years ago because of design flaws, but it's apparently here to stay. Originally designed for onboard lights on new-style Betacams--anyone remember the "Automatique" switch on gold mount plates that sensed the voltage draw when the camera ran and turn on your onboard light for you? The classic issue is the plastic housing wearing down to where the connector can be inserted backwards, as seems to have happened here. Very common with those 4-way mult-taps where the outer case splits over time. Then there's the easily mis-wired sockets; if one has ever worked on the assembly inside the gold mount plate, you know that the wires are simply pushed onto the pins, so they can sometimes be assembled with the wrong polarity. It's happened to me.

Even just today, I was rushing to plug in a p-tap cable and I stopped myself to look really closely and make sure that I was doing it the right way, as I usually do. Give me a Lemo, anyday.
 
The 'Automatique' "feature" I never understood. One of the dumber things I've ever seen a professional equipment manufacturer do, for sure. It came up every now and again on another board that catered to mostly "news shooters". Nobody liked it or thought it was a good idea. More people have been burned by the stupid "feature", including myself, than were ever helped by it(because it essentially killed power to the outlet unless you were recording, so nothing was powered when you plugged it in, so you thought the fuse was blown, bad cable or equipment was broken). The amazing thing though, is they still put them on camera battery plates to this day! I knew guys that would actually re-wire their plates to by-pass it.

Man, you're rough on gear, Charles. ; ). Just kidding. But honestly, in my 20 years, I've never seen a p-tap worn down so much that you could plug it in backwards. Even in "truck" and rental ear.
 
At one time the RED battery plates on the original R1 camera had a P-Tap just big enough that one could get the P-Tap connector in the wrong way if you tried. And there are a lot of 3rd party manufacturers that would make their power cables using soe cheap knockoff version of a P-Tap plug that was poorly enough designed that it would fit either way. Smart manufacturers would build their devices with reverse polarity protection, but I know of one company who made onboard monitors with super cheapo cables and no polarity protection. I saw those puppies get fried and take down cameras with them.

Any battery plate with the Automatique function also had a switch to defeat it.
 
+1 on letting D-tap die out and be replaced with something else. I had an AC plug a D-tap in the wrong way on a shoot years ago on a RED camera I owned and we had scramble to find a backup camera for the day. Needless to say it was not a fun day for the AC or for me.
 
Seen this happen enough times that I am super careful with P-Tap insertion. LED headlamp is part of my kit so I can clearly see what I am doing particularly in a darkened space during setup. Have an LED flashlight in each of my camera bags and main Pelican as well for this purpose and others.
 
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