What is "reliability" for you?

[willie_901]

What amazed me even more was, I got a new non genuine charger from eBay for fourteen dollars from an Australian seller that works perfectly ... in fact it's a better design than the original IMO. Sometimes it's just good to have what everyone else has. 🙂

My D200/300 and 700 bodies all use the same battery and those batteries seem to last forever. The only time I change D-body batteries during a gig is when I'm shooting sports and I want a have a fresh charge to keep the maximum FPS high during bursts.

I hope your discount charger has the same number of contacts as the batteries do. Some inexpensive chargers don't make full use of the smart circuitry inside the battery. If this is the case, then sometimes battery charging life is shortened or in the worse case the battery can overheat.

 

[Contarama]

N I K O N ... but I don't like the look of them much.

Yeah...AK47's are ugly too sir!!! 😀

 

[mtargz]

Why does the Leica suck so much power ... there's no refelx mirror after all?

If I remember correctly, a CCD of the M8's size sucks a lot more power than an equivalent CMOS sensor. Combine that with Leica's relative inexperience with digital cameras, a battery that probably wasn't cutting-edge even then, and counter this with Nikon's long-time experience making battery-driven cameras in general and digitals specifically - and you get one hell of a gap.

Leica's battery-dependent cameras appear to be serial battery-hogs: Just compare the M7 against a Hexar RF: While the M7 only uses the battery for the meter and shutter, the Hexar uses it for (relatively) blitz-fast winding and rewinding. And yet it gets along for more rolls and on smaller batteries.

Rethinking the points you raised, I think battery-related behaviour should count as a factor in reliability: Personally, I don't have a problem with using a battery-dependent camera for crucial applications, but only as long as I can trust a single set to last me for a while, and warn me well ahead of failure.

 

[pb908]

Leica's battery-dependent cameras appear to be serial battery-hogs: Just compare the M7 against a Hexar RF: While the M7 only uses the battery for the meter and shutter, the Hexar uses it for (relatively) blitz-fast winding and rewinding. And yet it gets along for more rolls and on smaller batteries.

Rethinking the points you raised, I think battery-related behaviour should count as a factor in reliability: Personally, I don't have a problem with using a battery-dependent camera for crucial applications, but only as long as I can trust a single set to last me for a while, and warn me well ahead of failure.

agree, +1 on Hexar RF battery usage, mine looks like last forever..also in my past Hexar AF.

still I have the same question in my head. how do I know if this or that RF is reliable enough for my usage, other than from user opinion like what we did above ?

 

[damien.murphy]

I echo Rogers statement a good few posts back - it should work when expected to, and should be repairable should it fail.

The concept of failure is an interesting one itself, and can vary quite a lot by user. For some, the moment a camera falls out of spec as compared to a brand new out of box model, it has failed. For others, a failure is only regarded so when something actually breaks within the camera, as opposed to things like a viewfinder or shutter speeds which may drift out of calibration and need to be re-adjusted.

My own personal preference, and in the absence of that mythical camera which never fails and never requires servicing, is for a camera that very rarely fails, but which may require the odd service over the course of it's long life. When a camera does fail though, I want it to be one that has parts/ is still repairable.

Ultimately though, a camera has to be useable and fit my style of shooting though, before I get around to reliability as a discerning factor..