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You are here: Home / The Last Word / Sony a7RII battery draw — summary

Sony a7RII battery draw — summary

November 10, 2016 JimK 4 Comments

This is a continuation in a series of posts on power consumption in the Sony a7RII. The more recent incarnation of the series starts here.

I’m getting ready to wrap up this series of tests of the Sony a7RII battery current drain. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be using the techniques I’ve developed for other tests such as autofocus performance, but I’ve reached the end of what I think is useful to discover about the battery drain per se. 

In this post, I’ll list the important things that I’ve discovered, and link to posts with more detail on each. I will try to keep this qualitative. For those of you who like graphs and numbers, there are plenty of both in the linked-to posts.

When turned off, the a7RII will drain a fully charged battery in about a month.

When using live view, reading the sensor and refreshing the screen takes much more power than IBIS, driving the focusing and optical stabilization motors in the lens.

Single shot autofocus uses little power, since the sensor read rate is only high during focus acquisition.

Continuous autofocus can use a lot of power, since the sensor read rate stays high during focus tracking (but not as high as during acquisition).

Firmware 3.3 uses more power during focus acquisition than Firmware 2.0.

Whether using the EVF or using the LCD uses more power depends on the shooting circumstances. Here are some numbers.

Just having IBIS available makes the camera use more power than would otherwise be the case, even if it’s turned off.

Just having OSS available in a lens makes the camera use more power than would otherwise be the case, even if SteadyShot is turned off.

Just having voice-coil focusing available  in a lens makes the camera use more power than would otherwise be the case, even if the camera is set to manual focusing.

Fortunately, the amount of power consumed by IBIS, OSS, and focusing is small compared to reading the sensor and refreshing the display. 

The amount of power consumed by shutter activation is low compared to reading the sensor and refreshing the display, even with EFCS off. 

 

The Last Word

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Comments

  1. Lynn Allan says

    November 11, 2016 at 1:17 pm

    Thanks.
    Do you anticipate doing tests like these for your Nikon camera(s)? (of only academic interest to this Canon semi-defector).

    Reply
    • Jim says

      November 11, 2016 at 1:41 pm

      I did look into doing it for the D5. It appears that there are parts available that can be taken apart and used to do the same kind of thing. However, my motivation is not high because the D5 has such incredible battery life. It would only be interesting if there were some internal working (like AF speed) that I wanted to observe with this method.

      Jim

      Reply
  2. Max Berlin says

    November 13, 2016 at 5:41 am

    Nice summary Jim.

    You’re getting better and better at boiling down your data to where us mortals can make use of it.

    The pleasure of finding things out….

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Sony a9 dynamic battery draw says:
    June 8, 2017 at 1:12 pm

    […] in several modes. Today I’m going to look at current draw as a function of time. When I did similar tests with the a7RII about six months ago, I found that you could learn quite a lot about the internal operation of the […]

    Reply

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