Got my new cam last night. It's a Minolta Dimage 7i. 5 megapixel, 7x zoom...etc. So far I'm lovin' it! I can't wait to get out and take some pics. My only concern now is battery life...I could take 100 pics with my old cam on one charge....with this it died rather quickly last night, but I'm not sure if it's just cuz the batteries it came with are crap or what. Got the ones from the old cam in it now...so we'll see how it goes.

[g®eg]

nickel metal hydride... the only way to go

They ARE.

[coyote]

that is what i run in my cam works grrrrrrreat get the quick charge ones i get like 240 on one set of batterys. where did you end up pick up that cam from josh ?

I got it on ebay....

I used NiMh batteries in my Nikon and they worked great. I charged up the NiMh ones that came with it, and played around with the cam for a bit last night, and they died rather quickly. I figure maybe those suck, but the ones from the nikon are in it now. We'll see how they hold up.

[oreo_n2]

I HATE BATTERIES!!!!
Nothing on earth erks me more than having to buy power for anything portable ?!?!

I always do the search for the best alternative to buying packs of batteries all the time. So recently, i came across some new batteries from Rayovac... and i actually got them at Target.

They have nearly triple the amphour rating of any other battery out there and they really do last ( i think they were 1450 mAH and the average AA is about 500 - 600 mAH).

I brought christina a set for her digi cam, and they came with a one hour quick charger, and a portable car quick charger and i am very happy cause i have not had to buy another battery for her camera since and they last much longer than the old rechargeables i got her, and when they do run down ~200 pics on her camera... they charge quick, anywhere. cant go wrong.
(and yea, they are the nickel metal hydride)

[twrayinma]

that's why you should get a vibe w/ a cord... batteries conk out at the least convenient moments.

[hohum]

I also use the rayovac batteries that oreo mentioned. I can attest that they last a long long time in both my olympus and my old Nikon... 200 pics or more... my bigger problem is having enough memory to store all i want to capture

- Chris

[oreo_n2]

NICE avatar!

[hohum]

heh, saw the pic, couldn't resist!

[benVFR]

I've got a set of AA NiMh 1600ma/h, and another set that's 1800ma/h. I split their use between my digicam and my GPS. I also have a dedicated 1500ma/h NiMh battery for my Minidisc player...

All I can say is they SUCK.... believe what you want, if you get Duracell M3's or Energizer Ti disposables, they last like 40-100% longer.

In one case my GPS burned through the NiMh batteries in 2.5 hours when I was bicycling in Maine a couple weeks ago... I almost got lost. Spec is 15 hours for that GPS. And I get 15 hours out of disposables.

Also, the NiMh batteries DO seem to get memory effects like NiCad. If you use them a lot expect them to lose 50% of their capacity within a year

Get Lithium if you can.... My SLR Camera uses two little Lithium batteries that together are about the size of one AAA battery, and Canon claims about 1000+ pictures out of those batteries with my camera. Granted it's not as power hungry as a digicam, but it does have a computer for the autofocus, a 4fps motor drive, and it has to be able to drive huge lenses, oh, and a much more powerful flash.

Ben

Well I just fired off nearly 100 shots at lunch and still showing full battery. I guess the ones it came with just suck...I'll stick to these (radio shack brand, believe it or not).

And Ben no offense but you seem to have contradictory comments to make about almost everything. My car being .0007 seconds slower in the 1/4 than the regular M, the fact that mySQL is the problem with the forum, not the server (which is total BS....the best forums out there all run on mySQL), and now NiMh batteries are crap, and buy lithiums (are they rechargeable?) because they work well in something that's electronically much different than what we're talking about. Save it.

ANY rechargeable battery is going to lose its capacity over time. Period. Does that mean buying batteries over and over and over is a better solution? I don't think so. Maybe there are lithium rechargeables...but I haven't seen them around. If that's the case, I would love to hear more info on them.

Seriously, no offense and I'm not trying to start a fight or flame war...it's just my observation.

And all this time I thought *I* was the king knit-picker.

[oreo_n2]

ruht! roh! shaggy!

[hohum]

hehe, JC there are lithium rechargeable batteries, but usually they are very specific use batteries (ie, you can't get em in AA format as far as I know, for example your cell phone battery if you have a newer cell phone)

being a 'fairly' green person, i'll take rechargeables any day over disposables, even if i do have to have a charger in my car, in my office, and in my home Plus, the non rechargeable kind although available everywhere would cost me a small fortune to keep replacing in the plethora of portable electronic devices that I always have around... btw, a constant use GPS receiver is about as high use a battery device as you can have... an SLR is very very very very low power consumption even given the motors controlling the lenses and the very simplistic computer (an SLR computer consumes about as much power as an advanced digital watch, take it from the 'ex power supply designer' )

- Chris

[benVFR]

Laptop Batteries, Wince devices, Palm Pilots, etc.., etc.. all use Lithium Ion rechargables.

How often does the rechargeable in your cell phone die? That's a Lithium Ion rechargeable too...

This is just one of my personal rants. 2-3 years ago a large # of digital cameras came with a Lithium Ion rechargeable battery... they were really nice. For some reason they disappeared off the market, and I have yet to find LiIon rechargeables that are AA shape. Sony used to make Discmen and and MD Walkman's that had about 4x the battery life of current models due to the fact that they came with Lithium Ion batteries... for some reason they took those off the market.

Batteries are one of the last annoying things about digicams...

Ben

Cool enough, thanks for the info. I'd try 'em if they came in AA size. Fuckers. So then we should all write to the battery mfgr's and demand that they make Li-Ion rechargeables in AA size. I'd really do that if I thought they'd care.

[benVFR]

My guess is maybe the Lithium batteries are worse for the environment...

Just make sure you carry at least 2 sets of batteries if you really, really want to make sure you're going to get the pictures...

Trust me, I hate disposables too.

Ben

Yeah environmental issues would make a reasonable/logical explanation. Yeah, I do keep two sets and my charger with me if I know I'm gonna take lots of shots. Now I have three sets (of 4), but if the ones that came with it don't work better than they did last night, they're going in the trash and I'm going back to radio shack to get more of those...cuz they work very well.

[g®eg]

...everything is bad for the environment

just when it was looking like there was gonna be a flame war too

oh well, back to SBN to see if I can Bait Sean "SliverStuffer" into loosing his cool

[JCsGrly]

Yeah I'm with Mick on this one - all I got out of that was blah blah blah blah blah

And what...no mention of the cute lil ducks we saw at lunch?! lol

oh yeah i got some pics of these ducks with huge (figurative) balls...they just waddled up off the river and hung out with us. I took some pics. This is one of 'em...kinda out of focus. This was probably 7 feet away from the duck.
http://www.nestreetriders.com/linkedto/jc/duck.jpg

Beware, it's about 3Mb. If you have IE6 be sure to expand the image to view the full size. It's f'ing huge!

[JCsGrly]

[coyote]

nice duck man

[g®eg]

is that one of them thar desmo-quatro ducks?

[snowborder]

JC, I have the same exact camera. How much you pay whered ya get it? NiMh is the way to go. Try using the viewfinder rather than the lcd display and that makes the batteries last about 10 times longer.

Suggest Carrying the batteries and a charger in a nice bag and you'll be good to go.

Keep in mind one picture at full res is 14 megs so Get a nice compact flash of 256 megs or higher.