I just bought one today and I have some questions…
Specificaly about the fuji finepix 2600 digital camera, but I hope that the questions can be loosly answered by owners of most types of digital camera.
Assuming I operate the camera without the lcd screen on, and leave the camera power on, how long, roughly, do fully charged batteries last?
Does turning it on and off require lots more power? so much that it would be more economical to leave it on between pictures? (because the lens comes in and out when I turn it off and on)
Why does my USB cable vibrate! (it vibrates on it’s own. If I plug the camera in, the camera vibrates too)
I own a Sony MVC-FD100 , and it is very different in a few ways from past cameras I’ve owned. I used to have a fuji digital camera, but the batteries were AA and rechargable, so they were not exactly longlasting. The battery for the FD100 is a small custom battery which lasts for about an hour and a half to two hours. So although I do not have any experience with your particular model, I do know that batteries do vary with their lifetime and AA’s havn’t been very long lasting in my experience.
Could you give me a rough idea how long AAs lasted in your experience?
was it around half an hour? or was it more like 5 minutes?
I know you haven’t any experience with my make of camera but you say you do have experience with AAs so maybe you have a rough idea how long 2 of them would last?
With mine I got 2 ‘fresh’ rechargable AAs. When I say ‘fresh’ I mean new, i.e. not recharged. (the general concensus is that you always need to recharge new rechargable AAs) so I got about 3 minutes use out of them, turning the camera off after every pic.
My old fuji had 4 AA’s and it took about 15 min to kill non-rechargable batteries, with keeping on the LCD screen (it didn’t turn off after every picture). There are a few unknown’s, however. Possibly your camera takes half as much power, or more or less (hope it’s not more if it takes 2 AA’s).
With fuji rechargable AA’s in it would last about 45 min or so, but again, there are many variables. I’d say definately go with a battery pack with your next camera, I’ve had a great experience with them.
I will almost always have the LCD turned off (it’s not really necesary is it) so that should prolong the battery life. And 45 minutes compared to 15 for normal AAs sounds excelent! Based on that Information I’m going to guess that my camera, with 2 fully recharged Ni MH AA batteries and the LCD turned off will last half an hour.
(the camera has an optical viewfinder so I can leave the LCD screen turned off all the time)
I have a Kodak DX-3900 which requires 2 AA batteries. I’m not sure how long it’d last but I was able to get about 150 pictures with the LCD screen on most of the time and turning the camera off after nearly every shot.
My Sony FD-90 came with proprietary battery pack, and I also picked up a second, higher-capacity version.
On the display is an indicator of approximate battery life; it usually reads something like 150? minutes on a fully charged high-capacity battery, but I’ve never tested to see if it’s true.
I can turn the LCD off if I want, but since there’s no viewfinder on my camera, I need the LCD to actually take pictures.
If I don’t use my camera for three minutes, it shuts itself off.
I have a Fuji 1400 which takes 600 mA with LCD on and 60 mA with LCD off. It drains batteries (4 x AA) like crazy. One solution is rechargeable batteries which I use ocassionally but I find plugging in an external power pack of 4 X Ds which I carry on a belt is better and they last forever. I wrote about this in a recent thread so I won’t go into details.
Not all batteries are created euqal. Don’t even bother using alkalines in a digicam. Waste of time and money. Same goes for NiCd rechargable. Get good NiMH and remember all the ratings are not equal. Rayovac 1600MAH are pretty good but Quest 1600MAH are noticably inferior
My Olympus Camedia C-3030 takes 4 AA’s
[ul][li]Generic no-name alkaline: worthless. They only lasted 10 minutes. I’m guessing that even when they’re fresh they barely crank out enough current to operate the camera.[/li][li]Name brand alkalines: last an hour or two.[/li][li]Energizer e[sup]2[/sup]: lastest at least ten hours.[/li][li]rechargable NiMH: last anywhere from one to three hours[/ul]-I have no idea whether you should leave the camera on or just turn it on to take a picture. Experiment.[/li]
-I also have no idea why a USB cable would vibrate. Unless you are uploading erotic photos.
I highly recommend the site dpreview. Although actually they don’t seem to have the 2600, only the 2700(look at the bottom of the page) but maybe that will give you some idea. The time and effort the guy who runs this site puts into reviews which are free on the net is astonishing. And he is not the type of reviewer who showers glowing praise on everything either, so I doubt he’s a paid puppet.
In very generic terms alkalines will give you twice the charge of NiMH and four times the charge of Nicads. The problem is, of course, alkalines are non rechargeable but for ceratin applications (like a camping trip where you cannot recharge0 alkalines may be your best bet. As I said, mine eats batteries like crazy but I use a belt battery pak with four Ds and it lasts for months and months. A lot depends on the frequency and type of use. If you can carry a pack then I recommend it. If you absolutely want internal then, if you take any significant of pix, NiMH would be the way to go.
A couple years ago I bought an NiMH pack for my laptop and it was a complete waste of something like $80 as I hardly ever use the laptop away from an outlet. The pack is dead and was hardly ever put to work.
Is the cable connected to the computer when it vibrates? I’d have to guess that the vibration of the computer fan is being transmitted to the cable. Perhaps this cable is particularly flexible or heavy and vibrates easily. Or it may be just the right weight and length to resonate with the fan, but that’s a bit harder to believe - such conditions are usually not easy to repeat.
Cameras vary a lot on power usage. I believe turning the camera on and off doesn’t waste much power, so just turn it off when you’re not using it. Or you could just set the auto-off timer to the shortest setting. Usually cameras turn on faster from the auto-off (or sleep) mode than when it’s completely turned off.
I have a Fuji & in the back of the instruction book it explains how long the batteries should go, so
you can read that. Ummm, for rechargable Nihms keep them in the recharger until the moment of
use. I haven’t timed it but the book says about 400 photos (high resolution) per battery charge, ha, AS IF !
I’m wondering if AA batteries are simply something from the early 90’s which were supposed to power electronics with less draw like walkmans and toys and the like, then ended up being placed in high draw electronics which were going for miniturization.
clayton_e, I have mentioned this before but anyway. IMHO many gadgets, including cameras and laptops, have batteries that are just way too small for them but there is a sound marketing reason and that is people would not buy bulky items and they prefer to waste undersized batteries than lug around a bigger item. It was happeneing 40 years ago with transistor radios using those tiny 9V batteries and it will continue to happen in the foreseeable future. My way around that is to use external power packs. I did the calculation in a recent thread so I am not going to do it again but by using a pack of D size batteries instead o AA the cost is like 1/8th or something like that. You might want to search the thread where someone was asking about batteries for some portable amplifier.
I think you’ll use the LCD while taking pictures more than you think. It’s very easy to use the “hold the camera at arm’s length” style, made popular by the camcorders with the big LCD’s. It also works quite well, in my experience. Plus the viewfinders usually suck on the digicams.
