5D2 Battery Dead in an Hour?

I had an E-Shoot yesterday. One of my cameras was the 5D2 that is probably about 2 years old now with the original battery.

Typcially, I can shoot a 10 hour wedding day and still have hours of life left in the battery afterwards. Yesterday, the 5D2 was one of my two cameras for this hour long shoot. I charged the battery fully before heading out and it was dead before the hour was over!

My preview was set as always on 4 secs., and three different lenses were mounted at some point: 35 1.4, 85 1.2 II, and the 16-35 II, all three of which are frequently on during a wedding shoot.

It's hard to believe that a battery goes that bad that quickly; that it didn't slowly start to lose life. Was this just an odd event? Or is there something about this body/lens combo that's especially hard on the battery?

Thanks.

Is your camera set to shut itself off? Is it a Canon battery?

Since it all happened within an hour,why not do a dry run and see what happens.

Look at your battery info in camera menu, there is a recharge performance, the new battery should have 3 bar, if your battery doesn't have 3 bar or at least 2, I suggest you to buy a new battery.

After charging did you check to see the percentage of charge?
How long before this charge was the last charge?
Did you have a lens with IS? Was the IS constantly functioning?
As already asked, what brand battery?


There are other questions that may be pertinent.
It is possible the battery is no longer useful and you will need another battery. 2 years is not a terribly long time, depending on prior usage this battery has served it purpose.

I'd suggest charging the battery again, use the camera for an extended period, and if it dies after an hour again it's time to get a new battery.

adding to what has been suggested above, how much were you chimping?

The age of your camera isn't really relevant, but how much use it has had is.
You could have had the camera for two years but only used it once a month or it could have been used every day - same age, but different amounts of work.

How much use has your camera had, or, more importantly how often has the battery been charged/discharged?
LP-E6 batteries (used in the 5D) have a lifespan of around 300 charge/discharge cycles when they will be at their best.
After that, their ability to hold adequate charge tends to drop off.

I use a grip, so have two batteries, but even taking 2000+ images with 5DII without a recharge, I've never come close to draining the batteries completely....

There are several things possible to save power...

I turn off image review entirely. I find it intrusive to have every image pop up. I have my "set" button assigned for image review, so can call up any time I want to check a histogram with either thumb.

My camera is set to sleep in one minute... Today's DSLRs wake up so quickly I see little reason not to set it to the minimum and save battery power.

Basically, the newer LP-E6 are quite good and give a lot of shots per charge. I have a second set for each camera, ready to go if needed... but honestly can only recall them once recently... when I forgot to charge up the ones in the camera before a big event where I took over 3000 images in a day (that happened to be with my 7Ds, not 5DII). For comparison, with BP511A/511/512 I always kept two sets of backups for each camera and found I sometimes needed them. The later of these batteries were considerably better, though... held more of a charge. And the later cameras using them were more efficient. (10D was hard on batteries for several reasons... But mainly it was slower to wake up so I had to keep the sleep mode at 5 or 10 minutes.)

AF activation and IS both use some juice. I can recall completely drainng 8 fresh AA alkalines in PB-E2 on EOS-3, with two or three rolls of film! That was when shooting wildlife and tracking them, frequently keeping AI Servo and IS active for long periods of time while waiting for shot opportunities. Even Nicad rechargeables give longer life than alkalines, though.

It would be hard to do, but I suppose possible to put a camera in a bag or pack and have the shutter release half-pressed, activating the metering, AF and/or IS and draining the batteres rather rapidly. (More often I just take accidental snaps of the inside of my bag, or the back of the lens cap.)

Some shooting modes use more power... Certainly long exposures, perhaps noise reduction, frequently turning camera on and off activates the cleaning cycle, etc.

It is possible that a camera simply has a short or fault and rapidly drains the batteries. I've seen that more than once with vintage cameras... tho I haven't with Canon so far... knock on wood.

I agree with previous post, check the battery info in the camera... It will tell you if the battery is bad. That happens... But you might just have not gotten a good, full charge for some reason.

And previous post is right... batteries are only good for so many recharge cycles. Without knowing how hard you have used them, it's difficult to say. But the new battery info that's available with LP-E6 can help tell you.

just buy a new battery.

Clean the contacts of the battery and the battery charger and the camera. Did this on my 5Dc and battery life almost doubled.

Thanks, everyone. I was going to just go ahead and buy a new battery, but I charged and used it all day for personal work and it seems perfectly fine. Can't explain the single incident, though. I remember once reading a thread years ago that some camera and lens combos really drain a battery and thought maybe that's what I had, but don't think so. Thanks!