1Dx single-shot power consumption

docholliday_sc001 wrote in post #17619888
That power consumption is the exact same as what my 1Dx was doing...and I'll bet the same cause. Just sitting asleep, draining battery on it's own.

The reason that configs can't be saved on the 7D2 is the dial on top. With the 1Dx, loading a config changes everything, and can copy settings between cameras.

Single shot is One-Shot AF, Single Drive.

Doc,
Dumb question, but what do you mean and what does the dial on top do to prevent saving a configurable file?

gschlact wrote in post #17620846
Doc,
Dumb question, but what do you mean and what does the dial on top do to prevent saving a configurable file?

1-series bodies don't have any hard switches, such as the mode dial at the top. The only "switch" is the power switch. In the 1-series, you can disable certain shooting modes (I have P mode disabled). If I copy my config to another camera, it will disable that mode, to make everything identical to mine. The rotary selection dial on the top left of the 7D2 prevents certain things from being saved and restored, such as that ability.

When I'm sitting on the couch 'playing' with the 1DX the battery drain is amazingly fast. But this includes a lot of image review, scrolling through the settings etc.

When I am on shoots I get plenty of image captures. I did an event shoot last month and took 3400 + shots and still had 12% (if I remember correctly - may have been more like 15%) left on the battery.

I carry a spare but have never had to use it.

I shot fireworks. Mostly in live view. Nearly all with long shutter speed. I believe continuous focus was off. In the 25 minutes, I shoot 116 photos and used 17% of battery life. Still not great but will continue to monitor and track OCV. I realize it was live view which had the LCD on, but realize it was mostly black using least power.

gschlact wrote in post #17622525
I shot fireworks. Mostly in live view. Nearly all with long shutter speed. I believe continuous focus was off. In the 25 minutes, I shoot 116 photos and used 17% of battery life. Still not great but will continue to monitor and track OCV. I realize it was live view which had the LCD on, but realize it was mostly black using least power.

With these LCDs, the power consumption is low anyways (LED backlit). However, there isn't a difference between a full white and full black screen - the backlight is still on with the same brightness. The pixels enabled to block the white light coming through doesn't draw but a few milliamps at most.

Now, on an OLED screen, where each pixel produces light, it's a bit different. In your case, LV with the sensor powered up the whole time is what is drawing power.

116 shots using 17% is pretty good, actually.

texaskev wrote in post #17622522
When I'm sitting on the couch 'playing' with the 1DX the battery drain is amazingly fast. But this includes a lot of image review, scrolling through the settings etc.

When I am on shoots I get plenty of image captures. I did an event shoot last month and took 3400 + shots and still had 12% (if I remember correctly - may have been more like 15%) left on the battery.

I carry a spare but have never had to use it.

Now that the consumption issues have been resolved on mine, I've noticed that rapid, continuous shooting sips power, but methodical, "spikey" shooting draws much more. That may have to do more with the power calculation in the firmware than actual consumption, as I notice that the camera will go back up 2-3% on long, slow shoots (has to do with sampling and cross section of samples, probably) when you have stopped.

I went and fired 100 rapid shots (single-shot mode), and the battery barely moved 2%. Waited about an hour and shot 12, with about 30sec in between - battery was down 2% from that alone. Waited an hour and the battery was back up 1% from where it was.

So what is it about spikey single shot shooting? The power is not sipped, even with LCD off and no image review. It is as if there is some bug in the firmware somewhere. My power up time I checked is less than a second for the red light on for the sensor clean to occur.

On my original 500 shots it was multiple days, and the battery would not let the camera turn back on, it was Tru 0%. BTW, live view is something I almost never use. It happened to be right for the fireworks with camera stabilized in my lap for the long exposures.

I think it has to do with the throttling of the processors. It must not get along with the firmware very well and gives false readings if it's allowed to idle for a period. Skews the data sample.

I use LV a lot in studio, mostly so that I don't have to bend down and stare through the viewfinder. Tethered LV is nice, but not practical when lining up a shot and building sets. When mine was acting up, using LV vs completely disabling any LCD usage (chimping, etc) almost made no difference with power consumption!

There's a thread on FM about a 5DsR sucking power too. I wonder if it's a processor/SoC that is used in the newer bodies (7D2, 1Dx, 5Ds/R). What really strikes me is that most of the cameras (99.9%) don't have an issue, but the ones that do seem to exhibit the same problems - all or nothing.

Hell, I even left the LAN configuration "on" without a connection trying to see if maybe that part was staying on despite what the menu said. Most modern LAN chips will power down the transceiver if it doesn't detect a physical link (PHY). I haven't disassembled my 1Dx to see what chip they use, probably a Realtek or Marvell variant. When mine was acting up, the power consumption using LAN and no LAN was the same. It was almost like everything on the camera stayed on constantly.

Have you done any tests with battery installed but no flash card? Or with different flash cards? Just a thought but my other card is Cf and much slower vs my sd that is 95mbyte/sec.

gschlact wrote in post #17623134
Have you done any tests with battery installed but no flash card? Or with different flash cards? Just a thought but my other card is Cf and much slower vs my sd that is 95mbyte/sec.

Ya didn't read, did ya? I've tried a bunch of cards, 3 different originally. It was a firmware issue.

I did read. I didn't remember was my problem. Sorry.
So my question remains, what happens if there are no cards inserted to rule out flash interface or controller? Maybe the card is getting read over and over or something. Then again maybe unrelated. Single shots spread out are fewer shots per unit time.

I still think another common denominator amongst the newer cameras is the new many point exposure mechanism. Each single shot takes new exposure vs burst.

It was an incomplete firmware flash and corrupted/incomplete parameter store. I reverted the fw to 2.0.3, then back to 2.0.7 multiple times. Nothing to do with the card(s).

I had tried 1 CF card, both CF cards, no CF cards. Same power consumption, same battery drain in sleep. The firmware was keeping 1) the processor throttled or 2) preventing a process/component from reaching baseline and shutting down.

It had nothing to do with the card, but the 1Dx is very sensitive to card types. A 600x 64GB UDMA6 card that I have takes ~3 seconds to spool up and allowing the camera to be responsive. The same card in my 1Ds3 takes < .5 seconds. However, the UDMA7 1066x card works fine in both and allows resume from sleep in < .5s. Probably has to do with the clock generator for bus frequency on the data line.

The power tap I was monitoring the power consumption of the camera showed that the current consumption was drawing the same in sleep mode as when on. +/- a few milliamps (probably the LCDs shutting down).

BTW, all the newer cards are clocking 142-148mb/s...I don't own any SD cards except for a 32GB extreme in my 1Ds3, which is only there for backup purposes.

Of course, since the problems seems to be occuring with all these newer bodies, I wonder if the hardware is advancing but their firmware team is still stuck in the stone age. RtOS's aren't that hard to write for, but simple mistakes and assumptions can be catastrophic (look at the Mars Rover's problem with VxWorks). I appreciate that Canon's locked the firmware so that people can't screw with it - there's something to be said about NOT having everybody's fingers in firmware development. However, it would also be nice to be able to see the code and possibly figure out what the cause is.

Well, hell, it would be nice if they just gave us a "factory-hard-reset" button somewhere inside the battery compartment that we could poke (or at least let us clear everything from EOS Utility)!

I understand.
Remember though, my camera came from factory with
A test for, ware. So it isn't the reloaded kind, but still I agree, must have a bug. However, if your issue resolved once you loaded it right, I am not sure how to explain mine. . Knowing the root cause in yours that was resolved would likely help diagnose my issue and many other 7dii owners also in single shot getting 500ish shots total instead of 2x that like on the 7d v1.

There's definately something going on with the newer bodies as on my 1Dmk4's on Sunday at a Netball tournament one was showing 55% charge on the rear LCD and I took 2650 shots over 5 hours and it still showed 26% charge left at the end of the day.

Bearing in mind I hadn't charged it for about 2 weeks and used it on several occasions since charging, I think that's good going. However I don't 'top up' my batteries before use. If I'm out I take a spare and replace if necessary unless the one in the body is below 25% when I do charge it but then make it the backup.

LincsRP wrote in post #17623451
There's definately something going on with the newer bodies as on my 1Dmk4's on Sunday at a Netball tournament one was showing 55% charge on the rear LCD and I took 2650 shots over 5 hours and it still showed 26% charge left at the end of the day.

Bearing in mind I hadn't charged it for about 2 weeks and used it on several occasions since charging, I think that's good going. However I don't 'top up' my batteries before use. If I'm out I take a spare and replace if necessary unless the one in the body is below 25% when I do charge it but then make it the backup.

Yeah, my 1Ds3 and 1D3 react the same way as your 1D4. The X was getting worse battery life than a P&S before I resolved the firmware issue. Now, it's been asleep for almost 2 weeks with the occasional powerup for a dozen or so shots. Battery's at 81%, and holding, so it's good now. If I went out and shot 1000 frames straight through, it'd barely use 10% power.

BTW, it's usually best to keep these batteries between 40-70%. Lithium's don't like to be run low. Nor do they like to be stored at 100%. So, I'll push a battery on charge before I take off for a long shoot, despite having quite a few backup batteries.