Battery problem? K5

Hello,

I am a first time Pentax user and bought my K5 back in August and have been using the original battery and one from VHBW via amazon throughout an East-African trip. I figured one change of battery would be sufficient given the official life given (taken with the obligatory pinch of salt!). But I am left disappointed with the battery life. I just want to see if I am having camera issues or too high-expectations issues!

From the manual:
Temp: Normal use 50% flash 100% flash playback time
23C 980 740 610 440 mins
0C 810 680 560 400 mins


I used live view only when using my manual only prime to help with focus. So maybe 10% of the time, and I hardly ever used the flash.

As I am both new to the brand and DSLRs in general, I have been cycling through the menus a lot, experimenting with settings, and reviewing / converting photos. Partly because I realised I didn't have enough memory with me, and I had no choice.

Basically I was firing off about perhaps 300 shots, plus maybe 2 hours reviewing and cycling though menus to adjust image paramaters to cope with the ever-changing light. This did include some internal editing and raw conversion (I know - still in play mode). Screen brightness was set to 0. But that was all I was getting from either battery. Given the numbers given above, even with the 2 hours(ish)screen use, I should expect roughly double amount of shots that I got - shouldn't I?

Scanning the forum topics I saw reports of people saying they had 1200 photos with 2 bars remaining. Is this for real, given the figures!

My battery meter also stays in 3 bar mode most of the time. Then as it depletes it quickly progress from 2 to black circle. In black circle, live view often just won't fire up. Sometimes like it says in the manual - if I've had the camera on for a while or in burst mode, turning it off and on again puts it back to 2 or 3 bars. Idiosincrsities of the camera I guess.

Do I have too high expectations?

Otherwise - very happy with the camera!

Sorry the formatting of the battery life has been screwed on posting - as follows:
All at 23 degrees:
normal - 980 shots
50% flash - 740
100% flash - 610
screen use - 440 mins

A couple of things I think - batteries do need a few recharge cycles to gain their full capacity, so I would expect that this will improve after a short while.

The second thing is it will depend very much on use. It's new, you're doing a lot of intense viewing, playing, processing, etc., so it will put a drain on the battery.

In the sort of use that I give the cameras, basically just shooting images, usually without flash and with a minimum of reviewing then the Pentax figures have been realistic. It only took a couple of charges for everything to be up to par.

Hope that helps!

John...I have a new K5 and the battery has only been charged once. Still full bars and I've taken about 100 DNG shots and I've also 'fiddled' with settings etc.

Seems OK but when you say recharging does this mean letting the battery virtually drain first or can you charge it any time to get it 'up to par'?

Cheers...another John!

Lithium Ion batteries are not supposed to have a memory, so in theory we could top up as required. However, I'm not convinced this is 100% true, so I tend to allow the battery to get some real use before recharging.

In practice, this means that I get a low battery indication in the field, change batteries when it stays low even after a rest, and then swap to the spare. The exhauseted battery gets a recharge after I return home.

It's never been much of a problems as these batteries seem to have a lot of power in them.

for the first cycles, a battery will not have 100% capacity, end of. Live View also really eats batteries - staying away from reviewing, I have well in excess of 700 shots from one. Video will kill a battery inside 3-4 hours.

The bar behaviour is *not* an idiosyncracy. The power available is so little that the voltage drops under pressure and then you have the "low battery" warning; restarting is not as heavy and therefore shows you green again. I've seen it a lot - LV says "RED!" but restarting without it brings back to orange.

I would strongly advise against running batteries much below 2% capacity on a regular basis but doing it that low occasionally is a very good idea. Also: fully charge them, especially the first few charges.

Bret

Thanks John,

I've actually had about 4 battery recycles on each battery now - not always from empty I must admit, but still.

My thoughts are that 440 mins screen use is a little over 7 hours. So just on pure mathematics, 2 hours use should give me about 70% battery for the photos - so about 600 photos give or take. And I'm definitely not seeing that!

Of course there is screen use and there is screen use. No doubt Pentax measured it with brightness set to -7, withought pressing any buttons or using live view or any processing. That's clearly not how I'm using it!

Now the big holiday is over, I'll spend some time shooting without any post in-camera and see what happens.

Thanks John and Bret for info.

Cheers...John

I've just finished the first complete charge on my K-5. About 150 shots total, of which about 20 with flash.

Two or three minutes total in Live View and Video, and apart from that, a lot of fiddling about in the menu.

I'll have to see what the next charge is like, but once thing I noticed was that the battery indicator was going up and down all the time. From 1 bar to all three depending on what I was doing, since yesterday evening.

This contrasts with the K10D behaviour, which, from the beginning showed a full battery until about 3 shots before it died completely (which was consistent across three genuine Pentax batteries).

Only did a partial charge on the battery in mine today. Still showing as full after150 shots, 10 mins of video, reviewing occasionally and some live view. I do have auto review set to off as I have always found that doubles my battery life.

I have a freshly charged battery in mine - I had to swap them out 2 weeks ago - and since then, I've taken 444 shots (RAW+JPEG). I am still on green on both batteries. I don't use video, I tend not to review on-cam much and I've been using either 24-70, 100-300 or 50mm. 0 flash.
These are all original Pentax batteries.

Bret