Seeking experienced advice:

Dave Platt wrote:

In article ,
Whiskers wrote:

I used to use rechargeable AA batts with my Fuji S7000. I had
absolutely horrible luck with them. Various brands, no good luck. I
could charge them until the charger indicated a complete charge *and
they checked out at 1.6x volts with my voltmeter*, put them in the
camera immediately, and get a batt warning light. Sometimes I could
get two or three shots; sometimes it would just shut itself down. I
wanted to recharge, but I just couldn't.

I'd query the accuracy of your voltmeter. NiCd and NiMH cells won't
deliver much more than 1.2v - but they do stay at that level until almost
completely discharged.

The open-circuit voltage of a NiCd or NiMH which has just come off of a
charger can be well above 1.2 voltl During the charge cycle it will rise
to above 1.5 volts (or more depending on the charge rate) before it hits
the zero-rise inflection point which indicates full charge.

Good info. My 1.6x readings were taken with two different voltmeters.

It'll drop quite rapidly when discharged - to 1.3 almost immediately and
to 1.2 once about 20% of the charge has been withdrawn. A normal digital
voltmeter has such a high input impedance that it wouldn't load the
battery down at all, and thus you'd probably read a rather high
open-circuit voltage for a cell that has just come off of a charger.

I'm with you...

I suspect that the original poster's camera has a low-battery detector

That's me.

which is improperly calibrated or adjusted - most likely it's set for
alkaline cells rather than NiMH/NiCd. A detector set in this mode would
tend to interpret the normal (plateau) voltage of a rechargeable battery
as if it were an alkaline battery which is just about to die.

Well, then it would be nice if they had a battery-type toggle for that in
software.

The Nikon point-and-shoot cameras I bought for my wife's use have a
three-way battery-type selector in the menu - standard alkaline,
rechargeable, and AA lithium non-rechargeable. As I understand the
manual, this setting controls the detection threshold for the
low-battery indicator.

Hah! Yeah, like that. My camera is but a lowly Fuji.

From a quick look through the FinePix S7000 manual, it doesn't look as
if it has this degree of adjustability. Unfortunate!

Bingo.

But thanks a lot for the above information. That situation bugged the
snot out of me. Even more so than just having to revert to nonrecharble
batteries. It was the WTF aspects that got to me the most.

I've had varying luck with NiMH batteries... there does seem to be a
fair bit of brand-to-brand variability. On the "poor" side, I had
disappointing results with Lenmar "NoMem" cells... even when freshly
charged they'd often "go flat" after about half of the expected use
(based on battery rating and the radio's known current draw during
operation).

The new generation of low-self-discharge NiMH (e.g. Uniross Hybrio,
Rayovac Hybrid, Sanyo Eneloop) seem to be much more consistent. My wife
took her L11 point-and-shoot on vacation a couple of weeks ago with a
fully-charged pair of Hybrio batteries in it - when she got back, the
low-battery indicator was on the screen, the camera still worked, and
she'd taken over 500 photos (many with flash).

Wow.

Thanks again for the good info, Dave.

--
Blinky
Killing all posts from Google Groups
The Usenet Improvement Project: http://improve-usenet.org
Blinky: http://blinkynet.net