Was wondering if anyone has personally used this drive and if so, have you noticed any significant increase in power consumption / battery drain. I have read several reviews and as far as speed goes this drive seems to be at apr with convential CF cards. The real concern seems to be power consumption. Most reviews state that there is an increase in power usage which only makes sense considering it is an actual drive with moving parts but no one can tell me how much power? I did read one very unscientific comparison of this drive with a Kingston 512mb card which claimed there was no significant differance in speed or battery drain.
Any insight? experience? thoughts?
thanks...
Jed
...off to Cozumel 4 days baby!!!
I use the 1 gig microdrive in my S2 DSLR. I'd say that I get about 300 shots from 4 AA's using the Microdrive. But it's an SLR - so the LCD is hardly ever on.
I'm sure the consumer digicams performance won't be as good. Anyone else have experinece with say - the Coolpix5000? I'm guessing you'll be able to get 1 dive out of the coolpix and that's it.
Cheers
James
About 1 dive is correct. I have not had a problem of it running out during a dive. That was also before the internal flash would shut off so I am assuming it will be better now. I will know more after next week when I put it to the test.
I got two dives with my Canon G2 and Ikelite housing on average. I kept the review on 2 seconds.
I have 3 microdrives for my topside shooting. Personally I love them.
I should add. I rarely took more than 25-50 shots per dive.
My experience: using C5050, internal flash only, all macro photography with flash on almost every shot. 4x2100mAh batteries (Sanyo), I had the camera on (with the LCD running) for about 120 minutes (not sure exactly), took about 220 shots, nearly filled the 1GB microdrive drive (98% full). That drained the batteries. Lucky it was the end of the (3rd) dive as well.
Not sure that the info will be useful unless you can find someone who wants to do the controlled experiment. Don't know who would decide to jump into the water with the intention of running out of battery power during the dive (I only did it because I was running out of silica gel packs and didn't want to open the housing unnecessarily), or who has the patience to do a couple of hours of draining the batteries at home - twice! (Once for Microdrive, once for CF). Sounds pretty unexciting as a way of spending an afternoon ...
