Canon PowerShot A85 PSU

Cancel that, took a gamble on +ve centre and that's right.

Cheers

That's what I always do :)

So did I until the smoke got out of a cordless phone base station.....

You're lucky because Canon has a history of putting +V on the ring, and GND on the tip.

It wasn't pure luck in fact. I couldn't measure any voltage on the plug I tried at first, so I assumed it was disconnected from the camera batteries, but when I tried a different plug - which fitted better - battery volts or enough leakage thereof could be measured so the polarity was clear.

So not really a gamble, I just said that to make me more attractive to girls.

Cheers

Panasonic? Both mine still worked afterwards.

Actually I think it was a Panasonic. Quite an old one - largish cream coloured handset, no LCD anything fancy.

I've owned three Panasonics with centre negative, the first two (a plain cream handset, and a black flip-phone) came used, and without power supplies and only bore the legend "DC12V". they were initially tested with wrong polarity and smoked a little, but after correcting the supply polarity they worked fine, I haven't investigated (since they worked), but suspect there was a crowbar diode in there that produced some smoke but survived..

A newer panasonic model has voltage and polariy marked