Why Does It Seem Like My Digital Camera Uses The Battery Up So Fast?
I have a Kodak EasyShare digital camera and it seems like the battery runs dead after only about 75 pictures. I put brand new Duracell AA batteries in my camera and went to the zoo for 4 hours. I took about 50 pictures before the low battery light came on. I always turn the camera off unless I’m taking a picture.
Are all digital cameras this way or is something wrong with mine? I saw Duracell batteries specifically for digital cameras when I was at the store but figured it’s just a marketing ploy to get people to buy those (more expensive) batteries. Am I supposed to be using batteries specifically for digital cameras?
Tagged with: Battery • Camera • Digital • Does • Fast • Like • Seem • Uses
Filed under: Digital Camera
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Your speculations are correct, your camera eats batteries at a prodigious rate and, alas, that’s fairly niormal for point and shoot cameras. But you have choices.
The most power hungry thing you have is the LCD. If you turn that off you can double the performance of the batteries. If you’re getting fifty pictures now, that will give you at least a hundred.
The next power hungry thing you have is the flash. Unfortunately when you need flash you need flash so you can’t just turn it off to save power. However I’d suggest using it wisely. If your subject is always far away the flash will drain completely when it fires and that will draw a lot of power to recharge it. If you keep your subjects reasonably close, say around six feet (two metres) or less, you don’t drain the flash completely and this will make your batteries last a bit longer too.
The third power hungry thing you have is the two little motors that do your zooming and set your focus. Again there’s really nothing much you can do about this, especially the focus, however try to avoid constantly zooming in an out as much as you can, this will save you a lot of power too.
Turning the camera off can actually cost you power. If you are in the habit of taknig a picture every three or four minutes, it makes more sense to leave the camera on because the power it consumes in those minutes (assuming the LCD is off in between pictures) can be less that it takes to start it up. On the other hand if you have the LCD on all the time turning the camera off between shots might save you power if your shots are more than five minutes apart.
You should also have a setting in your set up menu that allows you to establish when the LCD should turn off by itself, set that to the lowest value so that the LCD isn’t on as often.
Something you should also be aware of with alkaline batteries is that they need a rest once in a while. They’re not designed for continuous operation. When your low battery indicator comes on, turn the camera off for a few minutes and then back on again. This sort of resets the battery and you’ll get more life out of it.
Battery wise, alkalines are ok for emergencies if you must take pictures, but they’re not really meant for digital cameras. The special ones that are labelled for this purpose are made for digitals. They have a bit more power and they tend to recover faster from a power drain, as a result they survive longer. However even these won’t give you really impressive long life.
Fundamentally you’re better off buying Nickel Metal Hydride (NIMH) rechargeables. A one hour charger and four batteries isn’t usually very expensive and the batteries can be recharged at least five hundred times so they pay for themselves very fast. When I used to use a point and shoot, I’d have two in the camera and four more in the case as spares. With those I could take pictures all day with no problem and then in the evening I simply recharged them.
Be aware though that they come in different flavours. AA batteries have different power levels with the most expensive having the highest rating. For a digital camera you want an AA battery that has a capacity of at least 2200 mah, better is 2400 mah. The package will tell you the power rating and the battery should too. You can buy less powerful ones for less money but in that case you better carry a lot of extras because they’ll run down fast. I’d say go only for the 2400 mah level.
The other thing you need to be aware of is that they do not hold power forever. They will lose about 1% per day. So just because you charged them fully a week ago doesn’t mean they’re at full power when you want to use the camera. Get in the habit of topping them up before you go out for a photo shoot. You don’t damage them by doing this.
Some camera manufacturers also have lithium ion batteries availabe for their cameras. In some cases you have no choice, only those from the maker will fit and work. In other cases you can use the manufacturer’s lithium ion battery pack (at a cost of course) or AAs. If your camera has such an option you’d be even better off with those, they last longer than NIMH batteries and carry more power. They also don’t tend to lose power the way the NIMH ones do. Alas though, they are more expensive of course.
In terms of your other question, no not all digital cameras are like this. As a class the less expensive point and shoot cameras do eat batteries. The higher end point and shoot do too but less so, my Canon G7 point and shoot camera does about 220 images on a charge, 450 if I turn the LCD off. And my Nikon SLR takes about 2000 images on a charge. So how come?
The higher end digital point and shoot cameras have more efficient circuits and technologies that reduce battery consumption but that’s also why they’re a lot more expensive, that kind of stuff is expensive. The SLRs have even more efficient circuits and technologies and they don’t use the LCD except to briefly show the last shot for two seconds. As a result they take very little power to operate.
I hope that this helps you a little.
Its a sad fact of life that the normal or alkaline AA batteries are just not made for lighting up the power hungry screens and flashes of digital cameras. The only way to go is rechargeable. Get the highest
miliamp rating and a good charger. Certainly a spare set of alkaline batteries for that emergency picture is always a good idea.
To get the best from any batteries you can do several things. Set the brightness of the screen to a low value. If you have a viewfinder (some new models do not), switch the screen off. If the camera has a “sleep mode” set it to a low value or just switch off between shots. (Note that cameras that have a motorized lens also take power as they open and close). The flash also uses lots of power. Some digital cameras have a video mode, don’t ever use it, if you must have video its better to get a proper video camera. On some models there is a continuous focusing mode, great stuff but that little focusing motor will soon shorten battery life.
It would appear that they go dead really quickly. I have swapped to rechargeable batteries. It costs a little up front but it does make a big difference in the end. I hope this helps.
Kelly
Daydreamsrainbows@yahoo.com
No try the more expensive batteries, they do what they say….
I do use the more expensive batteries for digital cameras, and they do last allot longer. I have a Samsung 730c and have taken over 250 pictures at the highest pixel setting and still have plenty of power left.
Some cameras also use more power than others, so you might want to invest in rechargeable batteries, get at least twice as many as your camera takes, so you can swap and go.
When it comes to digital cameras it’s REALLY worth the investment to buy rechargeable batteries. I have an HP M517 5.2 mega-pixel camera that came with rechargeable batteries, and a 4×6 color printer with a built-in recharging base for $99 at Staples.
The rechargeable batteries that came with the camera are rated at 1700mah. This allows for more pictures to be taken than regular AA alkaline batteries. However, I went ahead and purchased an independent recharging unit from Walgreens for $29.99 that came with 4 rechargeable batteries rated at 2200mah. This until charges batteries in 15 minutes TOPS!! The one that came with the camera took hours!!
Now, I can take hundreds of pictures with the generic 1700 batteries that came with the camera, and even more with the higher rated ones that came with the independent unit, with power to spare, and this is with the flash turned on!!
There are even higher rated batteries than the 2200mahs, I’ve seen them go as high as 2600mah, costing only about $19.00 for 4. The rating of the batteries and having a stand-alone recharging unit makes a BIG difference in how many pictures you’ll be able to take. The packaging on these rechargeables makes it even easier by informing how many pictures can be taken on one charge.
Check Walgreens, Circuit City, Staples, etc., for the 15 minute recharging unit made by Energerizer. It should be no more than $29.99 and comes with 4 rechargeables.
Trust me, you will save LOADS of money by making this small investment.
P.S. Don’t forget that you’ll need to also purchase an “SD card” with a storage capacity between 1-4 gigabytes in order to take the greater number of pictures than the internal memory provided with the camera.
Buy rechargable batteries. Buy a back up set of batteries so that when you head out on a trip you will be ready when the first set die out.
If it is not an inconvienence look throght the eypeice thing instead of using the view screen all the time.
the flash will eat your batteries up quickly, my Easyshare only went about 40 pictures with it on, but almost 100 with it off. Try lower settings as well and don’t use the LCD display if you don’t need it. This should help a bit.
Go to store and ask salesperson for rechargeables….big difference, and more economical.
Buy NIMH batteries that are rechargeable. The electronics departments of most department stores have them as do the big electronics stores. I paid $25 for my charger and 4 batteries. They last a whole day out even with using the lcd monitor and zoom. They’re marketed for digital cameras.
I’ve had my charger for about a year now. Eventually I’ll have to replace the batteries, but you save a lot of money when you compare that to buying batteries every time you use your camera.
Well you need to by the more expensive batteries because my friend Christina has the same problem so she got the more expensive batteries and it last long .