I’ve been spending a bit of time with the Canon 7d running the Magic Lantern Alpha firmware update and so far it’s been working pretty well. I know that many people have reported issues running Magic Lantern firmware when using a battery grip, so over the past few weeks I’ve been testing it on both the Canon 7d as well as the Canon t2i to see how many issues I run into.

Basically I’ve been testing Magic Lantern 2.3 on both of my t2i bodies to make sure things are stable before I start taking it out into the field. Over the past few weeks I’ve made it a point to use both the Canon 7d and t2i with battery grips attached while running Magic Lantern to see how many issues I run into. I wasn’t sure if I would get errors and dropouts with 2.3 and the alpha firmware during the testing process, so far things have been running smoothly. Some older versions of Magic Lantern gave me odd problems on the t2i when using a battery grip. Most of the time this would just cause the camera to lock up and I’d have to remove the batteries to get things to reset. Not a horrible problem but on some jobs it was enough for me to consider not using battery grips to avoid the hassle.

I’ve shot almost 14 hours worth of footage over the past few weeks while testing both of these cameras. I even spent some time shooting a number of time lapse sequences including last nights lunar eclipse.  So far I’ve had one recording error on the Canon t2i, but I’m not sure if this was caused by the memory card I was using or a problem introduced by the battery grip. Surprisingly I have yet to run into any problems on the Canon 7d.

The battery grip on the Canon t2i makes it so much easier to change out batteries when you have the camera mounted to a rig. It also gives you that extra run time and provides extended power for longer time lapse projects. Whenever possible I try to use battery grips to avoid the constant battery change outs and avoid the hassle of having to remove the t2i from a rig. I’ve considered moving to a Tekkeon Battery setup but I’m not sure I want to lug around that much weight. Plus it usually works as a good reminder for me to change out memory cards while replacing batteries. I’ve found it’s better to replace a memory card with a few GB left of space then it is to run out of space in the middle of a shot.

I was wondering if any of you have run into problems while using a battery grip when running Magic Lantern 2.3. Where you able to confirm that it actually was the battery grip causing the problem or was the error somewhat random? I just want to make sure I’ve found any errors I need to watch out for, before I take it out for real work. If I run into any problems I’ll let you know.


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