K-r Battery Life

Hi all,

I was shooting at a local festival with my trusty K-r last weekend and found the battery life to be beyond excellent - much better than I expected.

Day one, I used a set of black AA Eneloops. Was disappointed that within a couple of hundred shots the camera was saying they were exhausted - I carried on shooting with the battery gauge bouncing between full and empty before I swapped them out at around 1500 shots (even though they were still providing juice). Incidentally, I had the battery type in camera set to rechargables as I had read that this made the gauge more accurate. When I put the eneloops in to recharge the charger suggested they were 2 thirds exhausted so had a fair bit of juice left.

Day two I decided to try and see how much I could get out of them. I set the camera battery type to auto this time. So, recharged the same set of Eneloops for 2 hours and put them in. They lasted all day - 2843 shots in all and were still not empty. Shots were all Raw + jpg, fair amount of reviewing but no flash. Some use of live view too.

Pretty pleased by this result. Even the stock battery does well - at a gig recently I got 1500 shots out of one stock battery and it wasn't empty even then.

So, off to shoot at another festival on sunday - fingers crossed I get another full day of shooting without changing batteries!

Cheers, davey.

I agree the main problem is not the battery dying it is the monitor telling you it is dying! I have only twice got to the point where the camera actually stopped working due to flat batteries!
Tbh I carry several spare batteries and have given up on checking the monitor.

Rob

I don't believe the monitor either.

Yes - the battery monitor made be really nervous. I had 41 acts to photograph with 1 x stock battery, 1 x after market battery and 2 x sets of eneloops - and the camera was telling me the first set of eneloops were exhausted halfway through the second act!

I was relieved that it turned out to be a pessimistic battery monitor, and I was amazed at the life I got out of the batteries.

As a footnote, I recharged that set of eneloops last night. They were fully charged after taking 1500ma. When these batteries are truely empty they take twice that so I can only assume they were still far from empty.

Cheers, davey.

Interesting - my two sets of Eneloops show red after about 250 shots with no Live View or flash but some reviewing. I have Power Save on a minute. This was the K-x - not sure yet with the K-r but they were also showing as empty on the charger LCD.