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Battery saving tips.


tones

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Hey There. 

 

Was wondering if anybody has any tips or tricks to save battery life.  When i go out to shoot i usually have to take a spare battery with me. ( Which isn't too bad ).  But got me thinking about what can i do to squeeze a few more photos out of a battery.  For example, i usually have the camera on EVF with the sensor, so its off unless i want to look thru it.  The problem i noticed is that when the camera is hanging from my neck my body also triggers the sensor and turns on the screen...  I can't find a 'screens off' view mode, so the only way to have all the screens of would be turning off the camera.  ( also, it would be awesome to have that view mode button configurable, so i can put it somewhere else... its very uncomfortable to use where it currently is ) 

 

Is it ok to be turning on/off the camera every few minutes to take a picture and have it off most of the time?. Any issues with the hardware?  The biggest downside would be the startup time, I guess. Or is there any other pitfall? 

 

Does anybody has a good battery saving tip or thing to do?  

 

 

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Cheers!.  Coming from the DSLR world, got used to turning on the camera in the morning and turning it off 3 weeks later when the battery was getting low. I'll give it a go to have it mostly turned off and see if i can get more pics per charge.   And im not a chimper. Unless the .5s preview after the shot counts as chimping. 

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Did a pregnancy boudoir shoot this morning. Took 356 shots on a single battery, and it's not even half empty. But I don't chimp and don't take long to frame my shots.

 

The moment I lower my camera, I switch it off. When I want to take another shot, I raise it and turn it on. It's so fast, it's on anyway by the time it's near my face. It's a habit, you get used to working that way very quickly.

Edited by Tom H.
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Battery life from Fuji!

 

Fujifilm says (http://www.fujifilm.com/news/n160707_01.html) the shots per charge with one battery is 340, and with the grip you can get "up to" 1000 shots per charge - for three 1260 mAh batteries.  That is not a lot - eg, the D7200 uses the EN EL-15 = 1900 mAh and gets 1100 shots per charge.  That, of course, is a consequence of the high power consumption inherent in the mirrorless design. 

Edited by Mike G
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My experience has been that the EVF and the LCD are the biggest drains on battery life.  Minimize chomping and, set the power saving settings for the LCD to turn off after 15 seconds and get into the habit of turning the camera off when possible will add greatly to the battery life.

 

Unfortunately, short battery life is a reality of mirrorless cameras using electronic viewfinders instead of optical viewfinders.

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So, realistically, I'm getting the equivalent of 9 rolls of 36 exposure film out of one battery, on the XT-2, the size of 1 roll of 35mm film. I'm pretty sure on a "normal" street photography day I never shot 9 rolls of film. Doesn't seem that big an issue. Carry an extra battery. Still way less than I carried shooting film. 

 

Thinking about it, the issue might be we're shooting too many pictures. I'm certainly guilty of that. Just got back from a trip and on a ferry ride I must have 40 images of a mountain we were passing. 39 of those will be deleted. Not sure if the one I keep is necessary either. It wasn't a very interesting mountain. What I did consider is that, looking at the collection of dull mountain images is, in some aspect, digital has made me lazy. I just motored off mountain images, rather than consider what I was actual looking at. 

 

My 64Gb card holds so many images that taking a "few extra" images doesn't matter. With a roll of 36, I would have one mountain image, if any at all...

 

Warren

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So, realistically, I'm getting the equivalent of 9 rolls of 36 exposure film out of one battery, on the XT-2, the size of 1 roll of 35mm film. I'm pretty sure on a "normal" street photography day I never shot 9 rolls of film. Doesn't seem that big an issue. Carry an extra battery. Still way less than I carried shooting film.

 

Thinking about it, the issue might be we're shooting too many pictures. I'm certainly guilty of that. Just got back from a trip and on a ferry ride I must have 40 images of a mountain we were passing. 39 of those will be deleted. Not sure if the one I keep is necessary either. It wasn't a very interesting mountain. What I did consider is that, looking at the collection of dull mountain images is, in some aspect, digital has made me lazy. I just motored off mountain images, rather than consider what I was actual looking at.

 

My 64Gb card holds so many images that taking a "few extra" images doesn't matter. With a roll of 36, I would have one mountain image, if any at all...

 

Warren

Still shooting film on occasion is the best battery saving tip I know, makes you think before you turn on the camera.

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I've only had my xt2 for a few days.  When I got it, I put the 126s on the charger and put a third-party 126 in the camera (not a wasabi).  Today, I was playing with the camera; the battery meter showed 2 bars.  All of a sudden the battery indicator turned red and the camera shut down.  This happened in about a second.  I'm used to the batteries in the xt1 showing two bars left and going dead shortly thereafter but this was almost instantaneous.  Clearly, the battery indicator on the xt2 is not usable with the third party batteries that I have.  Can anyone confirm that the wasabi batteries work properly with the battery indicator?

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  • 7 months later...

Hey guys, this isn't just me making a random brag statement, I'm hoping it will get us all better battery life. I get a crazy amount of frames out of my XT2. With the battery grip loaded, I get no less that 1500 frames with more than a full battery free afterwards. My opinion on why I get very very good battery life, two things: I use EVF ONLY mode. So no automation needed to turn the EVF on, and also turn the camera off after every shot(s) as a reflex, then instantly on as I raise the camera to shoot again. I find it faster than Sensor Activated EVF and have never missed a shot. I think in a sentence, you can get fantastic battery usage from the XT2 if you keep it off when it's point blank unnecessary to be on.

I think my last wedding was 1700 frames on one set of batteries. With PLENTY power left to continue. 12 hours later!

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Yup shooting less is good. I came back from a 3 week trip in Canada 8 months ago with 10000 images and I am still whittling it down to a usable 200. The irony is that hte shots I really thought about were all keepers and I knew they were at the time. I could have probably written a list of 30 shots on paper and then just gone and looked for those.

 

However their is an argument that those 30 are so good because I sure put in a lot of practice with the other 9970 shots :)

 

G

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Another tip: If your camera has "high performance mode," turn it OFF unless you actually need it (for fast-moving subjects with continuous AF, for example.) You might think you want "high performance" all the time, but in my experience it seems to cut battery life almost in half.

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Hey Ranger, out of interest, I am getting my great battery life with high performance mode always on. I don't think that contributes and I am sure I'd get even better battery life if I turned this off.

 

Another tip: If your camera has "high performance mode," turn it OFF unless you actually need it (for fast-moving subjects with continuous AF, for example.) You might think you want "high performance" all the time, but in my experience it seems to cut battery life almost in half

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