Camera purchased 6 weeks ago and it does not turn on now. batteries read barely into good area on battery charger. thought regular AAs would work, but they don't. HELP!!

you need invest in geting battery charger them tipe of cameras take alot battery power.

The Kodak camera that I own states in the manual that you can charge the batteries only with the printer/dock or separate battery charger. I've left mine plugged into USB for hours at a time and never noticed a charge going into the battery. I use both AA lithium-ion batteries and the pack that came with the camera. The Li-on AAs work as well as the pack and for a cheap price, I purchased 4 AA and the charger (about $15).

digital cameras have always "eaten" batteries. tho there may be an internal defect in the camera i would suggest purchasing a good set of rechargale batteries and charger for them.

Robert

Likely it is a low battery issue. Either the rechargeable battery needs to be replaced or the charger isn't working properly. Try replacing the battery with 4 AAs (IIRC) and see if that works.

We have several Motorola radios, two of which came with the rechargeable batteries. In the past year, neither of the rechargeable radios would recharge. The batteries won't make good contact with the charger even when not in the radio. Now one works with AAs but the other lost its settings and we haven't been able to reset to contact the other radios.

Cindy Wells
(we looked into replacing the batteries. Motorola lists chargers and batteries for our older radios but not the two that came with their own chargers. The local battery store wanted ~$40 dollars to try and rebuild the units. Since the chargers are not making good contact, we decided to go with the regular batteries.)

I use my motorola cell phone charger....they're interchangable

Digital cameras in general use massive amounts of power to supply their internal electronics and that big, beautiful, bright LCD view screen.

We switched to 2500ma NiMH rechargeable batteries. At first they would barely work, about 25 shots and they would die, after 5 to 10 discharge/ recharge cycles though, they now work great. I recharge them every night and like to leave at least one set on the charger all the time to keep it 'topped up'. Most chargers have this feature, ours even has a built in fan for when the batteries get hot (they do on fast-charge mode).

Now the rechargeables work great, we recently went to a race for my daughter and took 1.5 gigs of photos and movies on one set of batteries! Amazing, considering with standard AAs, we would get about 6-10 minutes of 640x480 movies on a set of batteries.

Our rechargeable set is a cheapo Walmart close out (got it for $15- four batteries and charger!) by Digital Concepts.

Hope this helps,

Russell - Idaho USA

I have had a HP Photosmart 945 for a few years now. A few days ago was the first time I saw my camera experience the problem described above. I thought something is wrong with the on-bard logic.

Replacing my batteries (4x2300mAh NiMH AAs) with four other freshly charged batteries of the same kind didn't fix it. The camera's LCD kept flashing on and off for almost an hour until my family got tired of it and turned it off by removing the batteries.

I just replaced the rechargeable batteries with four regular alkaline batteries and now suddenly it works. Go figure.

The moral is that changing the batteries sometimes helps. When it works, it will get your camera going for a while. The problem, however, doesn't seem to be battery-related or I would have seen it a long time ago with smaller-capacity batteries like alkaline AAs. Something is very wrong with the camera itself, that much is clear.

Best-case scenario now is that I have an unreliable camera that can give out at any moment. For example today it died in mid-shot and almost spoiled a family event. For me the solution was "get a non-HP camera".

I hope this helps someone out there.

A quick test would be to purchase a set of Duracell Ultra Digital batteries and try them. They won?t last for very long; however, if they make the red light go away then you problem is either the batteries you are using or the charger. More often than not its going to be the batteries so we?ll start there: Check your batteries, you should be using Nickel metal hydride (Ni-ME) that are rated at 1450 (I use 2500) mAh or better. If the batteries are more than one year and you?ve used them a lot then its likely the batteries just aren?t holding a charge anymore. Purchase a new set or borrow a working set from a friend. Charge them in your charger and try in your camera, if the red LED goes away use the batteries till they need charging again. Charge them in your charger and if the red LED stays off then the batteries were the problem. If the red LED returns then try charging your batteries in someone else?s working NiME charger. Put them in your camera and if the red LED goes away then your charger is the fault.

I purchased a *ist DS used a couple of weeks ago, and it turns out to have similar problems. This camera seems very fussy about batteries. I am using rechargeable NiMh AAs. After about 30-40 exposures, the camera shows battery depleted. If I turn the camera off, then back on, it will show a charge - sometimes a full charge and will work for another 20 or so exposures. It can keep this up for a couple of days.

I read an explanation in one of the photo blogs (can't remember which) that suggested this was caused by one or two incompletely charged batteries in set of 4. If one is discharged the current from the others supposedly will flow to it, giving fluctuating power readings to the power management curcuit. This sounded plausible enough that I purchased a new charger yesterday which monitors the charge on each battery. Too early to tell whether this solved the problem or not. The other option is to switch to disposable batteries.

Have you tried it with lithiums? It may not be a discharge problem so much as a low-battery detect problem. The NiMH are very low voltage even when fully charged compared with a lithium, maybe that's a clue. Either way it looks like a trip to Mr Pentax to get it orted :-( FWIW I use lithium AAs routinely, I tried some NiMH that I had and only got about 250 shots per charg and they failed a bit too abruptly - mid file write! - for my taste. I get 800-1200 shots from a set of Energizer AA lithiums, they give me plenty of warning of impending failure, I can stand the cost and I value the peace of mind that they give :-)