Battery oddity?

Hello -

I have a K 5 and second battery grip with which I am generally very happy. It does have a little oddity; with both batteries having a reasonable level of charge, the battery indicator will fairly rapidly show a dropping charge. If I turn the camera off, and then back on full charge is indicated. I have of course the Pentax original battery and three aftermarket Wasabi units. I really can't determine whether this behavior is unique to any particular set of batteries.

Anyone else experienced this?

I have this problem with a K7 (bought used) I was using it the other day showing 75% charge and when I switched to liveview the camera locked and showed depleted battery symbol. Ten minutes later it resumed to showing 75% charge. I assume the battery is on it's way out and I need to buy a replacement, don't think It's anything to do with the camera.

John

Looks like the battery is unable to deliver the extra juice required for the live view. When you turn it off and on again the voltage rises until the drain gets too much.

Is it happening with more than one battery?
If it is only happening with the one, it is the battery. If it happens with more than one, it could be the camera. Check the battery terminals are clean, as well.

Many thanks for the comments and suggestions. Just today it did its "thing" and I continued shooting even though the "meter" showed no charge. Things went well; the "session" was about 30 minutes - Grandson Gabriel's third birthday - and the camera was on the entire time. Just now I turned it on and it indicates full charge.

As far as live view is concerned I rarely ever use it. I think I'll use only one battery at a time for a while and see if correlates with a particular battery.

And I'll shoot more with my new-to-me Nikon S2. No batteries, manual focusing film rangefinder. Bring out the exposure meter and the BW film and get back to basics.

I think this has been a common problem with just about every DSLR Pentax has released the battery level indicator just doesn't indicate battery level very well. I've had this with the K10D, K20D, K5 and expect to experience it with the K3II, the only model which seemed OK to me was the *istD, perhaps it's something to do with the battery.

It would be interesting to hear from anyone who's used AA's in the battery grips to see if they have the same problem.

I've had this same erratic behavior as described before on 4 generations of Pentax cameras (K-20, K-r, K-30, K-S1). It does occur on both original Pentax Li-Ion or third party (I use Hahnel).

Fully charged Li-Ion would go to half empty right after utilizing live-view or video-mode. Turning the camera off/on would reset it back to fully charged. At certain points when battery charge is not fresh anymore you don't know exactly how much juice you actually have in there!

On K-30 & K-r when AA-powered this does not happen. I got the best continuous performance with AA-lithiums, Eneloops were also consistent, only Ni-Mh were not so good, they were drained too fast.

I often get the same behaviour with my K-x. I think that this model was specially notorious for false 'low battery' readings, even after installing the firmware updates. I have even seen the effect with fairly new AA lithiums. If the camera goes to 'standby' after 1 minute (the default) the indicator shows full charge when the shutter button is again half pressed. It is annoying to have false warnings - when can one ignore them and assume that all is well?

I think I've had this on my K50 too. Using non-genuine and genuine. Im not too bothered, if the battery runs out, it runs out. I always carry a spare, so its no biggie, to me anyway.

Just noticed this on my K50 with 4x rechargeable AA batteries, using live view and a large Sigma lens both of which drain power fast. Charge level went right down after a few shots but now it's back to full. I do find that the Pentax battery is much better in this respect. Like the man says, always have a spare!

A rested battery can often recover a bit, so I suppose that one on the verge of changing the battery level indicator might flicker between the two states of indication.

I've not really been bothered by this as I tend to have the camera switched on between shots, so when battery power starts to drop I just change the battery. Better to do that I think than find it dies at a critical moment.