Friday, April 8, 2011

F550EXR – Video Battery Drain Test – Review Part 21

A quick test while I am doing other things. Load a freshly charged battery (overnight charge) and set the camera on a desk and press record in 720p mode. Restart the video every time the camera shuts off by itself, which happens a minute or so after the video has been stopped and saved.

The timings of the videos I got are:

  • 29:02
  • 29:02
  • 29:02
  • 9:18
  • 0:02

Total recording time on a conditioned and fully charged battery is 96m 24s – that’s a pretty decent number on such a small battery.

The last video (0:02) just confirmed that the battery could no longer support video. But I was able to snap a jpeg after that, and probably could have shot a few more before the battery went completely flat. As it was, the cam would not stay on about 30 seconds later.

The file sizes are: 2.14GB for the first three and 700.74MB for the last one. In case you are counting, my 8GB card was almost full. Another 4 minutes of video perhaps had the battery not croaked.

The 2.14GB max size concerns me … that sounds like a Motion JPEG codec limitation and it would be a crime if Fuji were to leave such a limitation in the firmware when they might be able to record a larger file in one stretch.

The Panasonic ZS3 can record 2 hours at once, which I much prefer for small venue recording. They do use a different codec, but I know that mp4 does not have such a file size limitation since I have mastered a Wintersleep concert that runs for a long time and is almost 6GB in size I think.

Anyway … another thing Fuji could address in firmware: remove the file size limitation so we can record 96 minutes straight.

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