[Leica] DMR Battery Life

[images at InfoAve.Net (Tina Manley)]

At 07:21 PM 10/8/2005, you wrote:
>Hi Tina,
>Please check ouot Marc Wiliam's impressions on Photonet at
>
>http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00DE6M
>
>about battery life. He gets about 250 pix per charge.
>
>Best Regards

And I get about 2500 with the Canon 1DMII!!  It's not that I object 
to carrying extra batteries or the expense of extra batteries.  I 
just don't want to have to worry about running out of juice in the 
middle of something important.  I never had to worry about that with 
the M7.  Those batteries would last for weeks.  I hope for and expect 
the same from digital.  I was disappointed in the Canon 10D, my first 
digital SLR.  I would have to change batteries at least once a day on 
long jobs.  I ended up carrying about 10 extra batteries!!  With the 
Canon 1DMII I carry 2 and don't usually have to use the second 
one.  For two weeks in Honduras and again for two weeks in Guatemala, 
I took 3000+ photos each time.  Each trip,  I used one 1DMII battery 
for more than a week, replaced it with a fully charged battery and 
came home with more than half of that battery still charged.

Another problem I have with the Canon 10D batteries, and I'm not sure 
if it's the same with the DMR, but it certainly is with the the 
Digilux, is that when I charge all of the spare batteries ahead of 
time, they lose the charge as they sit on the shelf or in my 
luggage.  I can put a fully recharged battery into my camera and find 
that the power is already more than half gone.  That doesn't happen 
with the 1DMII.  That battery stays fully charged for weeks until I 
get around to using it.

These may seem like trivial problems to somebody who uses their 
camera once or twice a week, but for somebody who has to rely on it 
every day, it's very important.  I have been very pleasantly pleased 
with the life of the Canon 1DMII battery and don't really care how 
much it weighs!  It's worth it to know that I'm not going to have to 
stop and replace it.

And I do have a connection for the car battery for the Canon, 
too.  Mine came with every possible connection for every electrical 
outlet in the world!  I'm carrying quite a few of them to China with me.

Tina

Tina Manley, ASMP
http://www.tinamanley.com