After about six cycles, the battery in my Nikon DSLR has died. It won't take a charge. (The battery is an EN-EL14 LiON OEM battery, not a knock-off.)
Which has made the camera itself little more than a delicate paperweight.
Hooray for my Canon A1000. It is irritating to use with a flash, for it'll think about it for a few seconds before firing, but at least it takes two AA cells and it always fucking works.
Unlike a more expensive Nikon DSLR. Piece of shit.
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Anyone whose product offers you a built-in battery is planning to obsolesce the product you have paid them for.
The Apple I-Pod is another example. Apple, out of the goodness of its heart, will replace the battery in your I-pod one time and one time only. After that, screw you, Mr. or Ms. Customer. Go buy another.
Ditto various operating systems that Apple, Quark and others "no longer support."
I propose that we no longer support them in exchange.
Very crankily yours,
The New York Crnak
To be fair, the battery isn't built-in. But it is $40, plus shipping.
I suppose I should look at it that even replacing a $40 every thousand exposures or so is still cheaper than shooting the equivalent amount of Kodachrome. But I still feel as though I've been ripped off by those fuckers.
I have had good luck with Nikon batteries in the past. There do exist batteries (and chargers!) that don't work well due to manufacturing defects. You may wish to contact Nikon and see if they'll do a warranty replacement, unless you're talking about a cheap point-and-shoot camera.
-BT
BadTux, it's a DSLR, which wasn't cheap in my book. I suspect that Nikon will tell me to stuff it, as it's out of warranty, but I'll give it a try.
Have had no problems (Turn a deaf ear to me, please Lt Col Murphy) with a Canon 5d MkIII DSLR. Originally got a MkII, upgraded to MkIII and haven't had *any* trouble in 10s of thousands of images. I am actually pushing a significant fraction of my Flickr space.
http://tinyrul.com/sdean-dance
What a lovely, powerful picture taking machine. I have been photographing since 1960 or so, with Nikon Fs and Nikkormats and Olympuses in film (and even 8x10 large format). This camera just works: fast, reliable. Love my 85mm F1.2 portrait lens. Only thing I've ever like more was the 750 mega-pixels equivalent resolution of the 8x10. Digital resolution is picayune.
Lion Batteries are weird compared to what we may be used to...
First they have circuits to protect them from over charge and also over discharge usually built into the battery. They last longest if only charged to 90% and only discharged to say not less than 40%. With care thousands of cycles. Over discharge can kill them fast as in sudden failure. They are best stored at 50% charge as it insures they don't go to zero too fast and they suffer less stress. I've been using them more and more and they are amazing
but very different from the old NiCd or NiMh we know.
One annoying thing I've sen is if the battery discharged too far sometimes the protection circuit gets stupid and prevents recharge.
Nikon, and Lion, don't blame the cow for soggy cereal. Likely the battery was not made by them.
Groan, get a quality replacement, and try again.
Eck!
Good points, Eck. I've done characterization of Lithium-Ion batteries before and will add a little something for you. First, if you don't fully charge the battery occasionally, the protective circuit loses track of how much charge remains in the battery and underestimates it and underestimates it until finally it will only let the battery stay on for a short time before shutting off. This can be resolved by fully charging the battery a couple of times while letting it discharge to about halfway. The protective circuit will reset its notion of "fully charged" and the battery will be back to normal.
Note that lithium ion batteries need to be charged with a constant-voltage power supply (with current limiting for the precharge stage to prevent fire/explosion), not a constant-current power supply like other batteries. Just another way they're weird. You know they're charged when current inflow at V(c) approaches zero and levels off. (Typically 4.2 volts for a cell). If you check the actual voltage of the battery with a voltmeter and it is somewhere between 3.8 volts and 4.2 volts, you still have life left in the battery -- 3.8 volts is about 40% charge, 4.2 volts is of course 100% charged, amount of charge drops in a curve that starts shallow and then starts falling off a cliff between those (3.9 volts is about 60% charged for example).
Secondly, modern electronic devices are never completely "off". They're always sending a little bit of power to circuits that e.g. monitor the power button. So when you aren't using the camera, *remove the battery*. Doing that will greatly enhance the life of the battery because it won't be getting drained all the time while sitting on the shelf.
Finally: It may be possible that the battery charger for your battery is not putting out the proper voltage or is shutting off before the battery is charged. Is it an internal charger or an external charger? My Nikon is a point-and-shoot and it has an external charger, those are fairly easy to test with a voltmeter, though because of the sense wire you need to tie little wires to the + and - pegs and put a battery into the charger. The voltage between the + and - pegs should then approach 4.2 volts after approximately 1 hour if the battery was completely discharged, within less than that if the battery had charge. Unfortunately with that setup you won't be able to see current flow (unlike our setup in the lab where we had both current and voltage meters), so watching the current flow and verifying that the charger doesn't cut off until the current curve flattens out near zero would be difficult. You'd have to create a harness like we created in our lab to monitor both in order to verify the proper operation of the charger and battery. (And yes, this was a very kludgy-looking test harness that we whipped up, with plenty of duct tape even as well as a little light bulb to discharge the battery at a constant drain when we were doing capacity testing, but it worked!).
You probably do need a new battery at this point, but if your charger is FUBAR, the new battery will get FUBAR'ed too. So it's well worth it to either test it yourself or find someone local with the skills to test it. Otherwise you'll just fry your new battery too...
"Sense wires"??
Crimus. At this point, I wish they'd put Kodachrome back into production.
Comrade, on my Nikon battery the sense wire is the middle wire. Assuming your Nikon battery is similar to mine, if you look at your battery you'll see three copper strips, each marked with symbols -- one is +, one is -, then a funny symbol on the middle one. The middle one is the sense wire and its purpose is to let the battery charger know the battery's current voltage (or more on some batteries).
One other thing about lithium ion batteries: Do *not* leave them on the charger once charged. That will ruin them. These are not lead-acid batteries that want to be kept topped up, continually topping them up will eventually destroy the battery. As Eck pointed out, the batteries want to be kept between 30% charge and 80% charge. It's okay to recharge the battery once you've used the camera for a while, but don't treat it as imperative to recharge a battery that still has plenty of charge in it, and definitely *don't* leave it on the charger once it's charged.
There are five pins in the charger and five slots on the battery.
All I am getting from Nikon is "you need to buy a new battery." They are ignoring the point that the battery failed so early in its expected service life.
For five pins, generally two outside are ground, two just inside that are +4.2v, and the center is the sense wire. But that depends on if Nikon followed the normal scheme for doing this, and without having that particular battery in hand I couldn't tell you that.
But anyhow, there should be enough info above to keep you from killing this new battery like you killed the old one. Lithium batteries just don't act like old-time batteries, you can't leave them on the charger like lead-acid batteries and you want to keep them half-charged (and removed from the device) while in storage. Just the way it is.
get a quality replacement
Such as? That's a serious question.
How do I tell what is a good battery and what is assembled from dried out camel shit?
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