Dave Platt wrote:
In article ,
dvus wrote:

I wonder if the 2 Gig memory card that's installed could be the
problem? Has anyone had a problem like this that could give me some
ideas?

I remember seeing a report of exactly this sort of problem a while
ago. See

http://www.jlaforums.com/viewtopic.php?p=11693034

Very interesting. I brought up the SD card on a whim, but this info makes it
worth investigating. For now I'll just pull the card and see what happens
using only internal memory.

I saw another mention of a similar problem in a posting at Steve's
Digicam Forums but I can't find the article at the moment.

If you look you'll see that I've been talking to a few people in there and
the feeling of some is that the Z812's voltage requirements are more than
some NiMH batteries can handle. I can't dispute that specifically, only
anecdotally in that the camera worked well with NiMH for a year or so brfore
this problem started, and I had the same 2 Gig SD card in it from day one.
That doesn't preclude something from having changed within the card that
could cause a leak, however, so I'm going to see what happens without the
card installed.

The problem seems to depend both on the camera brand/mode, and on the
SD card brand/model. I don't know why, but hypothesize that some
characteristic of certain cards can cause a camera's firmware to fail
to power the card/socket down when the camera goes to sleep ("switched
off"), and that the static current drain of powering the card
eventually flattens the battery.

Interesting theory. I guess it's certain that the internal cpu in the camera
has an input sensing the presence of a memory card. What it does with that
information is anyone's guess. Another friend told me about a guy who's
camera would apparently turn off but remained on internally to some degree
for some unknown reason, so your hypothesis seems feasible. Man, do you have
to be an electrical engineer to take snap-shots these days?

Try a different brand or model/type of card.

Or none. That's as significant a change as I can think of. If it seems to
make a difference, I'll go get a Kodak SD card. *That* brand had better work
well!

--
dvus