*ist DS misreports battery as dead

My *ist DS (c.3 years old) has an irritating problem that occasionally happens on a change of batteries. When the batteries run out and I put in a fresh set (either NiMH rechargeables or, as a back up, Duracell AAs), sometimes the camera fails to pick up the fact the batteries are fresh, and continues to report dead batteries.

This sounds like it might be similar to the problem reported here a couple of years ago, for which no solution/explanation appears to have been suggested. Does anyone have any ideas as to what this problem might be?

I'm going to take a guess here but I assume by the fact that you own an older camera that you also have older batteries. I used to have the same problem but it was solved when I dumped my high capacity charger and bought a high quality charger. Here is a link to the manual of the charger I got that gives a very good battery education. http://www.mahaenergy.com/download/mhc9000.pdf

I did however find that this charger did a poor job of re-conditioning my old batteries and I eventually just replaced them. My only regret, I wish I would have bought the 8 battery model. http://www.mahaenergy.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=422

Regards

Drew

For troule free battery operation I use only Sanyo Eneloop batteries and an Ansmann Energy 8 charger. No problems.

Eneloop batteries have two main attributes of interest to me.

1: They are more similar in size to Alkaline batteries. I find NiMh batteries to be very slightly longer which puts more pressure on door catches. This is of particular importance if you own a AF360FGZ flash with it's apalling door catch.
2: When charged, they stay charged for up to a year if not used. NiMh batteries stay charged for only a few weeks at most due to the self discharge characteristics.

The only downside is that they don't have the capacity of modern NiMh batteries and are at present limited to 2000maH. I'm sure that'll change. I haven't found it a problem.