I know it's horses for courses, and equipment differs, but my first digital camera used AAs, and it ate them by the package. When it died, and I got my current one, with a rechargeable, smaller, flat battery, it was like emerging from under a heavy tarpaulin, suddenly I had staying power! But I am talking about the low end of the market.
--=20 Davey.
The Powershot A1200 has an optical viewfinder, and is about £50 at Jessops. Excellent little camara.
I'm using a Fujifilm Finepix s1500 Bridge Camera which takes 4 AA size cells. I reckon I get about fifty 10Mp photos out of a set of freshly charged cheapo NiMh cells and about 400 photos from a set of Duracells.
Incidentally a propos the enquiry in the OP the Fujifim is not a compact - it's a bit bigger than that but it does have a rather nice electronic viewfinder. I can't see the detail on the rear screen unless I change my distance glasses for my reading glasses but I can focus on the viewfinder image in my distance glasses - which is a positive benefit IMO.
Nick
Precisely - I prefer AA cells as it's easy to carry a little pack of 4, they'll still be useful after a year or more and will be OK for 200+ shots per pair - more if flash isn't used.
Just helps prove that the first camera, a Canon A300, was pretty darned useless. It's failure, and therefore its replacement, was the best thing that happened to it.
--=20 Davey.
I've got a Fuji S1800 which has an excellent zoom thereon and is very useful for work. I've been using it with these from RS
Never checked the number of pix on one charge but it does seem rather good..
Every digital camera I have had got more pictures from a set of rechargeables than from duracells (alkaline ones, I have some nicd ones). IME duracells just can't handle the drain the camera can put on them.
That would make sense. The rechargeables I use are low-capacity pound-shop ones and an eight-to-one performance ratio shows pretty poor capacity from the supposedly high rated Duracells.
Nick
I used to think that before I got a modernish camera with a li-ion battery. That can take way more photos than I can be bothered with in two weeks, and if I'm really paranoid a spare battery is pretty small too.
You'd get a couple of hundred on a set of eneloops, plus you could leave them in the camera for weeks and not worry about self discharge. Cheap NiMh are crap, take them out of the charger, put them in the camera and travel 50 miles by a very fast car and the capacity is down to 50% (or it seems like it)
That's what forced me to go the Eneloop route - I'd carried a spare Fujicam in the glovebox and sometimes when I'd get it out, the batteries would be flat, and on one occasion the spares were flat too. This was while trying to make sure the batteries were charged and changed every two months, three months max - still got caught out. Since changing to Eneloops (and similar Vapex from
OTOH I found that decent conventional NiMh batteries worked well for me on a Canon Powershot.
Iwt a lot depends on the current demand of the camera. Borderline NiMhs cacked out on start-up but they might not have in another cam.
Just an observation here: Many years ago, I was given a vacuum cleaner for PC Keyboards, powered by one Duracell AA. I used it a couple of times, and then put it to one side, with the battery still in it. The other day, I dug it out of its hiding place, and it still worked. The battery in it has a Best-before date of 2008, so is quite old, but still has power, and runs the pump. I know there was no drain while it wasn't doing anything, but that, to me, is not bad going. I can't imagine other normal batteries staying alive that long without exuding all sorts of nasty chemicals.
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