Sunday, April 10, 2011

F550EXR — Over night battery drain is **not** a fatal issue – Review Part 26 ** Updated 13 April**

I’ve rewritten this article completely. A few people have reported that the F550 loses battery over night. There have been two variations:

  1. Bill reported that he tried several batteries in his F550EXR and the cam wiped all the batteries out over night. He swapped it and the new one is good. It also have much better GPS performance, although it is unknown whether the two symptoms are related.
  2. Paul reports that he had a bad battery shipped with the camera. After buying a spare, he found that the problem did not manifest while using the new battery. This might be the more common case.

The following video shows what happens to the cam when the battery goes flat over night. If you run into this, keep trying to switch the camera on and you might get the lens to properly retract eventually.

I had what appeared to be the same problem, but recently I left the “bad” battery out all night and 36 hours later it seemed fine. The battery I had in the cam is still full after 3 days with at least 100 images shot in RAW+JPEG, so I am willing to say that I may have a bad battery but my camera is definitely fine.

So if you have the problem, try a second battery (dirt cheap on eBay) and see if that was the problem. If you have a dying cam on multiple batteries then you need to get it replaced before your window of return expires (21 days at Henry’s in Ottawa.)

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