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Battery Problems with ND

Se,

Let me add my 2 cents. As everyone has mentioned, the original charger is a joke. However I have found the batteries to be alright for their rated 1700mah when charged with a decent charger. I am currently using a Powerex MH-C401FS (great for traveling, as it's fairly compact) and their MH-C777Plus-II for more serious conditioning,

Even with the Sanyo 1700mah batteries I get over 110 shots during average shooting conditions. I had not used my camera in two weeks when I shot around 40 frames, but I just checked and it still has sufficient operating juice.

How do you have the power settings? I usually set the camera to shut off after 2 minutes of no use. If you have it set to not sleep automatically, you could be getting lots more drain than necessary.

If you're draining properly charged batteries after two days under absolute shut down conditions, either your particukar batteries have gone bad, or (Heaven forbid!) the camera is defective.

My advice:

1. Get a good charger. I got mine through

http://www.batterysupply.com

2. Charge-discharge cycle the new Sony batteries through two or three times (I believe NiMH batteries do need to get some break-in to achieve their full capacity) then charge them over-night and try them. If you still get the abnormal drain, I would have the body checked by Contax.

As far as mirror speed, I do not notice a difference from 1/60th or faster, but do under 1/30th. It is a mechanical thinghy with much more inertia than the shutter, so it will never quite catch up after a certain speed. 1/60th = 17ms seems reasonable to me.

Enjoy your ND and learn to love it's couple of idiocyncrasies - I certainly do!

DJ
 
This is really a useful forum! I just posted the problem yesterday and by today, I have all the answers!

Thanks guys!

I have no idea that a charger can make such a great different to the life-span of rechargeables. I will try to look for the recommended brands, and leave the batteries in my Contax ND when not using it, and see whether the problem still persist. If it does, I guess the set may have some bugs.

The other point I have to confirm is whether the rechargeables (1800 mAh) in my TLA360 are NiCd or NiH, since it was mentioned that NiCd has no problems holding charges but NiH has. It is quite unbelieveable that my flash is consuming less power than my ND!

Back to the mirror question. The reason I am concern with the ND mirror reflex action is because my N1 is definitely more responsive than the ND. If I use a faster shutter speed (say 1/1000) on my N1, its mirror will stay up for a shorter duration than at a lower speed (say 1/60), where the mirror stays up longer. The ND mirror reflex is that slow that I can notice the difference - it doesn't sound or feel right. Serious.
 
I have checked. The batts in my TLA360 are 1800 mAh NiH too! But they last like much longer in there than my 2100 mAh batts in the ND. I will look for a better charger in the mean time.
 
Se,

How are you charging the TLA-360 batteries? Remedially, you could use the same charger, even if it means putting them in the flash.

DJ
 
Thanks DJ for the advice.

Now, there is a new problem with my ND.

Why are the pictures I take have different coloured lines accross them! There are times when there a wide, black bars across them.

Is this a battery-related problem, or a memory-buffer problem, or the memory-card problem or is this inherent in ND AGAIN?

Please advice. Thanks!
 
> Hey,

My Nd has never exhibited such a problem. I would first try a different cf card. On printes, this is usually indicatative of not enough memory in the computer (banding). If the CF card does not cure the problem, sounds like bad memory in the ND.

Good luck,

Michael.
 
Se,

The banding you have mentioned is not an idyosincrasy, more like a defect, as is such high battery drain. Yiu really need to get that thing looked at by Contax. Personally I would return it or exchange it if possible.

DJ
 
I agree that there are serious problems with the ND, not just the battery issue. I just spent a week using my fathers ND while on Vactation. I am not new at all to digital photograpy, (I own a Fuji S2 pro) but for the life of me I was not able to get a decent picture with the ND all week. The color balance is the most finikey adjustment on any digicam I have used... It would produce only what my father and I have begun dubbing "cadaver skin" tones, especially with the flash used. I tried every and all types of different settings and finally just left the color temp at 8200 for all settings. On top of these problems the camera consitantly underexposed by at least 1.5 EV... However, this is not too odd as my experience with Digital is that they all underexpose a bit which is preferable to blowing the highlights.

It's a shame that such a well built camera can produce such duds for pictures. I'm sure that given enough time and energy (battery problem pun fully intended)I could figure it out and get some decent output from the camera....but I don't think I should have to do that...

Sorry for rambeling and please don't flame this...this is just my opinion and I'm sure that others are having no problems at all with their NDs.
 
Kerry,

I'll be the first to admit that the ND is no Point-And-Shoot. But it only takes 1 minute in Photoshop or any other utility that lets you adjust saturation, contrast and brightness to quickly set things aright. The color balance per se is excellent, it's just that out-of-the-box the saturation and contrast are muted.

In one literal minute you can get beautiful images. At least that has been my experience. And you will be rewarded with images that surpass anything you can get in 35mm digital format save the EOS 1Ds, IMHO.

You can get far more acceptable out-of-the-box results by using the higher chroma and contrast settings in the menu, and/or by using firmware version 1.08, which has hotter base settings to start with, but for best results with the most tonal range I use the normal firmware and settings with post-processing.

As usual, YMMV
happy.gif
. Cheers,

DJ
 
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