Internal battery

A friend of mine has just had to change the internal battery in his Nikon because the time and date went dead. I was wondering if our Pentax cameras have one to keep the time and date memory in tact.

In your computer date & time and certain other basic info is kept in battery powered CMOS Ram - I guess it is the same in a digital camera?

Roger.

If the K-5, K-7 and K10D have one then there is no user access to it, and no reference to one in the manuals. The *istD has what’s referred to as a ‘Backup’ battery which is accessed via a cover on the bottom of the camera.

It would not surprise me if there is one in the current models but I guess they expect it to last the lifetime of the camera, if it did fail then the camera would need to be returned to have it changed.

It may not be a battery, it could be just a capacitor. Many compact cameras loose their settings if left with a run down or no battery. Anyone experienced that with a Pentax DSLR? I'm sure there is a thread here where someone was saying their camera would not remember its settings when it was turned off and back on again. A duff battery/capacitor might cause that.
Mention was made of a Nikon camera having an extra call for its internal clock. The Canon EOS I had for a time did too, but none of my Pentax's do.

John

It's probably a capacitor as if you leave the camera with no battery in it for long enough the settings will be lost.

Something has to ensure the various memory items are kept intact whilst batteries are changed, or if they run down.

It's really only the clock that requires power, other general settings are likely stored in some form of non-volatile memory. There's a lot of menu options and other parameters, but when you squash them all into binary bits they don't take much space. As has been mentioned, capacitors are probably more common today (and are used in various 'kinetic' type watches).

Hi All, I have a K70 that anytime I turn the power of the systems resets, defaults to 1/120 F8.0 iso @100 and I mean every time.
I never let the battery run down, and I have 3 Pentax batteries to replace it with once i get a "red" battery indicator. I assume it's either the internal battery that is dead, or the capacitor.
I'm a computer engineer (286 - Pentium) generation; but i can work around a lot of electronics - I was wondering if it makes sense to take it apart to fix it. I have 2 K7's and another K70 I really am cheap and don't want to by a new camera because I don't do it as much as I once did. Does anyone have a solution, if so please let me know... Thanks in advance

In my K-3 in some of the customer settings it seems to have managed to save f/4 as the aperture value so any time I use that and switch the camera off and on again it goes back to f/4. I don't think it should do that but certainly if you're using something other than a custom setting you've saved it shouldn't.

If the internal battery/capacitor was dead then it would prompt for the date and time every time you switch the camera on.

The Pentax cameras have a soldered chargeable battery (i.e. accumulator), this is used to keep the data when changing the accumulator. unfortunately in the user manuals you are advised to store your camera without inserted accumulator, this leads to deep power states in soldered battery, if this happens frequently it damages the soldered battery like any other rechargeable battery, deep power states are deadly for rechargeable cells, and they are hardly to revive. So the advise is to use your camera reguarly (at least every few weeks/months) store it with an loaded main battery, and check the state from time to time and recharge the main battery (its no problem to have the main battery out of cam for the charging time, if this allready leads to a problem the internal cell is done, and you have to set date and time and settings everytime you chang the main battery). Use the internal battery as it is intended, keeping the data while you took out the main battery for charging)

Cool username. Are you the owner of this?

this is helpful, thank you.

It's been well covered here:

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/114-maintenance-repair-articles/426486-maint...

Yes both my K30 and Kr suffer from this

I had cause to dig the K5 out today to attempt an SDM-screw drive conversion and remembered this thread.

It's got to have been in excess of 2 years since the body saw daylight and had been stored battery-less in that time at room temperature. Upon powering up, the date had reset to 01/01/2010. I used a DC power supply whilst working through the conversion and disconnected it when done. A few hours afterwards, the calendar and clock are still showing today's date.

I've only lost the date settings on my long neglected *ist DS - the K5iis still hold the settings even with little use.

That DC power supply is a great little accessory to have, I've used it for sensor cleans and for a very heavy macro set-up a few years ago!