John, I follow about the same practice as you. Along with that, I charge and put in a fresh set before each session that I would be shooting. Session could be a walkabout, a portrait session, a wedding, an event - whatever. I don't have any quirky problems following this practice.
-- Best regards, Bruce Saturday, January 8, 2005, 12:24:38 PM, you wrote: jpc> Jerome Reyes mused: >> >> I remember playing with a pre-production model a couple of years ago at >> GFM before the camera hit the market. Everything worked fine on it... >> except the battery indicator would flip out more often than not. It would >> show depletion... but then if you turned the camera off and on, or better >> yet just let it sit for a while, and it would be totally full again. The >> joke was that the camera was self-charging. But in all seriousness, we >> were told that this was the last kink in the system that Pentax had to >> work out... but perhaps they didn't quite get it right until a few >> production lines rolled. >> >> <shrug> jpc> That's about my attitude to it, too. I think the battery indicator just jpc> samples the voltage occasionally, rather than being a continuous meter. jpc> If the camera was busy (focussing, writing to the CF card, etc.) at the jpc> time the voltage was measured, you can end up with a transient low-charge jpc> indicator which goes away the next time the voltage is measured. As you jpc> have found, one way to force a new measurement is to turn the camera off jpc> and back on again; I've found that simply half-depressing the shutter to jpc> trigger the auto-focus, exposure metering, etc. generally works as well. jpc> I've learned to ignore the transients. But as soon as the indicator goes jpc> off full charge, and stays there no matter what I do, I treat it as a jpc> signal to change the batteries at the next convenient opportunity. That's jpc> almost certainly an overly-conservative approach, but it's cheap enough; jpc> I carry at least a dozen extra charged batteries as well as the eight in jpc> the camera and grip. I don't see the point in risking missing a shot by jpc> trying to squeeze every last electron out of a battery.
