And some of us do have a well founded preference for off-the-shelf general
garden variety power sources. YMMV but please don't simply disparage the
use of
regular old AAs as for some of us there's a lot of advantage to be had when
all
our kit uses the same batteries.
Certainly is an advantage... however the times when I use anything battery
powered but the camera itself are relatively rare. :-)
I remember some folks on the Leica list whining that the SF20 flash unit took
these "godawful non-rechargable lithium cells and what an expensive pain that
was" instead of good old AAs. Well, I bought an SF20 flash unit because it
was reasonably priced and a good match for my Leica M6TTL. I used it for a
year and a half, and when I sold it the same batteries for the new owner
lasted another year or so. Lithiums are smaller, lighter and pack more
capacity.
If you use a lot of flash and other devices that use AA form factor
batteries, yeah, that's a good reason to stick with them. And I don't think
what Pentax has done with the D/DS/DL/DS2 and standard batteries is at all
bad. But overall, if I had a choice between a battery designed and tailored
to give the maximum performance vs a standardized battery, I'd probably pick
the former.
Right... a quick list of things I routinely use that can use
AA's in or around my camera (traveling, etc):
- External Flash
- MP3 player
- Active noise cancelling aviation headset
- Flashlight
Having them all use the same batteries means less expense and
aggrevation of keeping multiple batteries, chargers, etc going.
Also, I submit another argument. If the camera comes with a
proprietary battery, it would be extremely wise to purchase a second
battery immediately. If not, there will likely be that "killer shot" that
gets missed due to battery mismanagement (dead at the wrong time).
Charging that one battery isn't instantaneous (even if power is
available), so having a spare is a good idea. For proprietary batteries,
that adds $50 to the cost of the camera body for off the bat. With NiMH,
you can either use an emergency lithium, AA, or an inexpensive second NiMH
set of rechargables. Cheap insurance.
-Cory
--
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* Cory Papenfuss *
* Electrical Engineering candidate Ph.D. graduate student *
* Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University *
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