On last year's trip to the UK with the DS, I purchased five sets of Lithium disposables (CRV3 and AA) before leaving. During the course of the trip, I made 2900+ exposures. I didn't change out the third set of batteries until I'd gotten home and had made a total of 3400 exposures. I put the fourth set of those batteries into that DS body (this is July of 2005) ... they're still in the body today, still registering fully charged, and I've probably made close to another 1200 exposures with it (haven't looked lately). The fifth set is sitting in my backup battery pouch.
As I said before, the Epson P2000 storage tank will download up to 13 1G cards on a charge. That's 1300 RAW exposures, roughly, so to handle 3000-4000 exposures you're going to need a charger and/or a few spare batteries for it. You can run the charger from an inverter used in a automobile 12V DC accessory socket. For the CompactDrive PD70X or HyperDrive, a set of the Lithium AA disposables will also go a long long way. I don't think there's anything to worry about going out into the boonies where getting to power will be difficult ... just carry enough AA or CRV3 Lithium disposables (for a Pentax *ist DS, or HyperDrive storage unit). Personally, although the romantic notion of going out into the boonies like that is appealing fantasy, I find I am not a boonies kinda guy and will always have power available within a day or so, at least until civilization collapses. My photography is not wildlife or landscape in central thrust... Similarly, when I leave on a trip, I package up my spare body for quick shipping by courier rather than carry it as a matter of course. I'm only very rarely in desperate need of a camera at every minute of a trip, I can handle a 48 hour delay. And, knock on wood, I've never had a body fail on me in the field. G Bob W: > on the longish trips that I've been on I've always taken cameras which > can operate fully manually, plus at least 100 rolls of film. The film > is indeed bulky, but depending on where you go the trade-off is not > just a laptop, but all the battery power you may need to operate all > the electronic gadgets that shooting digitally seems to demand. Even > rechargeables are no use if you're going someplace without > electricity. > > I'm currently thinking about and half-planning a trip to the Caucasus > next year, to places where there is no electricity at all. So far I > haven't done the testing to see how many frames I can shoot with my > digital camera before I have to change the battery, and I'd be > interested to know how long the batteries last in any bulk-storage > device I used. I certainly wouldn't go for a long remote trip without > taking at least twice the maximum number of batteries I would expect > to use, and then a few more for luck. > > I saw someone in tears once who'd spent thousands of dollars on a trip > to the highlands of Ethiopia for a once-a-year festival, but had run > out of batteries before the festival even started. She was using a > Pentax MZ-something and approached me because she saw that I was also > using a Pentax, but I wasn't able to help her. Her trip was in ruins. .... > One of the important things is to try and eliminate show-stoppers and, > as far as reasonable, single points of failure. It's therefore wise to > have at least 2 bodies and a set of lenses with some overlap in their > range of focal lengths. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
