On Sep 29, 2005, at 4:06 PM, Rob Studdert wrote:
And some of us do have a well founded preference for off-the-shelf
general
garden variety power sources. YMMV but please don't simply
disparage the use of
regular old AAs as for some of us there's a lot of advantage to be
had when all
our kit uses the same batteries.
Certainly is an advantage... however the times when I use anything
battery powered but the camera itself are relatively rare. :-)
I remember some folks on the Leica list whining that the SF20 flash
unit took these "godawful non-rechargable lithium cells and what an
expensive pain that was" instead of good old AAs. Well, I bought an
SF20 flash unit because it was reasonably priced and a good match for
my Leica M6TTL. I used it for a year and a half, and when I sold it
the same batteries for the new owner lasted another year or so.
Lithiums are smaller, lighter and pack more capacity.
If you use a lot of flash and other devices that use AA form factor
batteries, yeah, that's a good reason to stick with them. And I don't
think what Pentax has done with the D/DS/DL/DS2 and standard
batteries is at all bad. But overall, if I had a choice between a
battery designed and tailored to give the maximum performance vs a
standardized battery, I'd probably pick the former.
Godfrey
