[popov1100]

I've got a quality charger, (lacrosse) and even new nimh cells are "empty" for the ist-dl2....

so..... this is not a solution for me.

one year ago, the IST-DL2 works fine with no name nimh cells.
today, even with energiser cells, it said 'empty battery'

[jkomp316]

I've got a quality charger, (lacrosse) and even new nimh cells are "empty" for the ist-dl2....

so..... this is not a solution for me.

one year ago, the IST-DL2 works fine with no name nimh cells.
today, even with energiser cells, it said 'empty battery'

The only thing that would drain it that hard would be a faulty flash unit.

[thehorologist]

Hi guys

This is my first writing to this forum. I was searching Google to find out if other people also experience this problem. I am an electronics technician, and have found out what exactly causes this problem. So, if there still people out there struggling, let me know and I will help.

I have read pages and pages of complaints about the battery warning empty indicator on the istD. It seems to be a major issue on many threads in this forum. I tried everything suggested in the posts to no avail. Just when I was about to consign the camera to the trash, I set the top left mode dial to flash before switching on with the same batteries previously showing empty. The camera sprang back into life.!
Wonder how many gave up before me?
Chris Bowden

[thehorologist]

I've got a quality charger, (lacrosse) and even new nimh cells are "empty" for the ist-dl2....

so..... this is not a solution for me.

one year ago, the IST-DL2 works fine with no name nimh cells.
today, even with energiser cells, it said 'empty battery'

I have read pages and pages of complaints about the battery warning empty indicator on the istD. It seems to be a major issue on many threads in this forum. I tried everything suggested in the posts to no avail. Just when I was about to consign the camera to the trash, I set the top left mode dial to flash before switching on with the same batteries previously showing empty. The camera sprang back into life.!
Wonder how many gave up before me?
Chris Bowden

[Robin Olivier]

Dear Chris

Glad you got your camera working, though the process is rather hit and miss; I hope it lasts and will work again. I did get mine repaired for £34; I cant remember exactly what it was but this chap who runs his own repair business was able to track it down. However to no avail as the sensor card has now given up so I have bought a secondhand Pentax Kx, and so far am very pleasedwith it.

Best wishes

Robin Olivier

[SteveB]

It's quite likely that any consumer electronics from the 2000 - 2005 period especially has had so called 'bad caps' fitted. My Olympus C750 had, and just about all of these ended up with the same 'can't take the batteries out for 1 second or lose all settings' issue once they were about 3 yrs old due to a particular capacitor dying. There were also loads of motherboard failures which prompted all those ads about using genuine Japanese solid tantalum capacitors to circumvent all the bad publicity. It was all caused by rather inefficient industrial espionage evidently.
Some info at badcaps

[papilucio]

Hello,
I just registered to this forum to thank Mangusta for his tip
Last week I bought a K100D said to be faulty, because "battery went low after two shots". I bought some Eneloop, but the problem remained and it was clear that it was the same problem as described here.

So, I grab :
- the K100D service manual which can be found here : http://www.pentax-hack.info/firmware/k10_gx10/older_sm.zip .
- a 470µF / 16V Sanyo Os-Con capacitor I had in my caps box (10mm diameter, I was sure I would no be able to fit it in the camera. But I was wrong !)
- usual tools for this sorts of things : multimeter, screwdriver, soldering iron,...

I found out that the best place to put the capacitor was under the SD card reader. Plenty of space here, and close to positive main lead. A spot to solder ground lead is close enough too
Be very carefull while unmounting and follow the service manual procedure step by step : the only step you can skip is removing the front cover. Other step are mandatory to unmount the rear panel and reach the place we want.
Be aware that this involve some soldering/unsoldering skills and flat ribbon cable plug/unplug (yes, with those sooooo breakable connectors...).

And here it is, I put a circle where I did solder the wires. Hope this helps !

Attached Images

 

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Last edited by papilucio; 11-11-2013 at 02:41 AM.

[downunderman]

Thanks for all the input/ suggestions, I bought some lithium Batteries Pressed various buttons whilst turning on and off success at last

[gordonb3]

Hope nobody is annoyed for me reviving this old thread. I came across this site as I searched for possible known issues with my *ist DL showing an empty battery symbol on new alkaline batteries.

The story starts that I discovered I had left the batteries in after my last use some six years ago but there was actually pretty little damage. Just some blue dust that simply wiped off with a brush. So I dropped in a couple of new AAs and ... nothing. After fiddling for about half an hour the only positive result was that the display now showed the battery indicator flashing so there was an electrical contact but why did it say that the new batteries were flat? Reading through various articles on *ist DL battery issues, including this lengthy thread, I became tempted to trash the camera but then I noticed a random comment about the SD card.

Thing is I've had weird battery readings for years on that camera. Sometimes the battery indicator would flash when I turned the camera on and then when I turned it off and back on again the battery would show at least half full. I've had numerous occasions where I had a spare set of charged batteries and they would always show empty when I needed to replace the batteries in the camera. I had always blamed this phenomenon on the batteries but now I don't know whether that was truly ever an issue.

What did happen however is that many years ago I had ran out of space on the SD card and gone into a game store where I bought a 2G SD card marked "SanDisk for Wii". I never really gave that any thought, simply assumed that this was about matching some write speed requirement (I still think it is) but not how that might affect other properties such as power consumption. So on a hunch from that random comment I took the card out and dropped in a no-name 1G card and presto! Full power on the display and the camera came to life.

Moral of the story: don't replace the memory card in your camera with a high performance card.

[steephill]

Eneloops or non-rechargeable Lithium AAs are probably the best battery option for the *istDx series. Also make sure that you have the latest firmware loaded, the original version was not compatible with SDHC cards.

[gordonb3]

Hey, thx for responding. I'm actually pretty much done with rechargeables. Always underpowered, lifetime never seems to really get even close to what they're supposed to and they are hard to dispose off if the environment is what prompted you to get them in the first place. I like the one-ways a lot better.

Fun thing is that I have nu clue what SD class that "SanDisk for Wii" is. I could probably run a speed test to find out but the main thing here is that I had that card in the camera since likely 2007 and all that time never realized that it was this card that was causing me the weird power issues. The reason for me posting this here is that should someone else stumble on this thread like I did they can find another thing to check before grabbing a soldering iron and possibly make thing worse.

[asussome]

Hope nobody is annoyed for me reviving this old thread. I came across this site as I searched for possible known issues with my *ist DL showing an empty battery symbol on new alkaline batteries.

The story starts that I discovered I had left the batteries in after my last use some six years ago but there was actually pretty little damage. Just some blue dust that simply wiped off with a brush. So I dropped in a couple of new AAs and ... nothing. After fiddling for about half an hour the only positive result was that the display now showed the battery indicator flashing so there was an electrical contact but why did it say that the new batteries were flat? Reading through various articles on *ist DL battery issues, including this lengthy thread, I became tempted to trash the camera but then I noticed a random comment about the SD card.

Thing is I've had weird battery readings for years on that camera. Sometimes the battery indicator would flash when I turned the camera on and then when I turned it off and back on again the battery would show at least half full. I've had numerous occasions where I had a spare set of charged batteries and they would always show empty when I needed to replace the batteries in the camera. I had always blamed this phenomenon on the batteries but now I don't know whether that was truly ever an issue.

What did happen however is that many years ago I had ran out of space on the SD card and gone into a game store where I bought a 2G SD card marked "SanDisk for Wii". I never really gave that any thought, simply assumed that this was about matching some write speed requirement (I still think it is) but not how that might affect other properties such as power consumption. So on a hunch from that random comment I took the card out and dropped in a no-name 1G card and presto! Full power on the display and the camera came to life.

Moral of the story: don't replace the memory card in your camera with a high performance card.

Hello, gordonb3!

Interesting finding about improper sd card for this camera!
Can you please tell me, have you tried turning on the camera after ejecting sd card for Wii, but before inserting noname Sd card? If yes, how did the camera behave?
Resently bought K100d super and it showed low battery issue with generic duracells, then woudnt turn on at all even with Eneloop batteries.

[gordonb3]

Hello, gordonb3!

Interesting finding about improper sd card for this camera!
Can you please tell me, have you tried turning on the camera after ejecting sd card for Wii, but before inserting noname Sd card? If yes, how did the camera behave?
Resently bought K100d super and it showed low battery issue with generic duracells, then woudnt turn on at all even with Eneloop batteries.

Good question. Yes I in fact did and at that point the camera still showed the empty battery symbol. It was only after I inserted the good SD card that it came to life.

I do also have a theory on this. I read another comment that said that the camera has an internal rechargeable battery as well, which makes sense as that allows you to change the batteries and not have to set date/time on every swap. The presence of that internal battery probably also explains why the camera was initially completely dead and the empty battery symbol popping up later on may not have been due to my fiddling being a success but the internal battery having been charged enough (remember I had not used the camera for several years). An interesting property of that internal battery was said that it does not just keep track of date/time but it also caches several other parameters which apparently includes the battery level indicator. My assumption here is that the internal logic simply stops if it finds an error situation like no SD card being present and consequently does not update any of the other parameters.