Originally posted by aliasant Hmm. The batteries died just 5 minutes after writing that post :/ Typical
But The indicator went thru orange to empty in hours and after that I have taken hundreds of images over 3 days and the meter has been on empty all that time. I use manual focus so that part aint a problem. WHen I replaced them I tok the oppurtunity to messure their capacity and they all had about 1200mV left in them. Weird.
Here's a bit of an explanation.
Pentax dSLRs using AA batteries all have a common family trait of being fussy with batteries -
due to momentary high current drain (up to 1.484 Amps) and using voltage level threshold (cut-off at 1.15V).
When there is current demand the battery's voltage drops - the higher the current demand the more the voltage level drops.
eg: the K200D will shutdown at 1.15V per battery = 4.6V total (see post #
25 in
K200D Battery Meter Problem )
remember also even if a single battery is low (at higher current drain/demand) - it could cause the whole set to fail.
Here's a graphical illustration using that 1.15V voltage threshold (horizontal line in red)
(NOTE: to be fair - the horizontal scale in this animated comparison are not the same for the higher capacity NiMH, their ranges are wider (better) )
Since the max current demand seemed to be tested at about 1.484Amps the critical curve would be somewhere between the
2Amp curve (dark green) and the
1Amp (purple).
The eneloop shows more curves above the
1.15V red-line than the 2 well known higher capacity NiMH, and if one cares to look at the curves in
NiMh Battery Shoot Out - the eneloop maintains noticably higher voltages than any other NiMH battery LSD or otherwise.
This is the reason why the majority consensus here whenever AA battery problems are mentioned that then knowledgeable will recommend eneloops.
I use eneloops in my K100D and K-x and I get about 1,000 shots on the K100D and over 1,100 shots on the K-x per charge, and often the camera(s) will be unused for weeks, then I will shoot hundreds of shots in a session -
eneloops have served me well.