There have been many posts on this forum over the years asking how to get longer battery life while shooting with an intervalometer. While there has been a lot of helpful advice offered, I have never actually seen any data about how well each of the suggested optimization works. So I wrote a little <Battery Intervalometer> script to do some testing and publish the results here for discussion.

The script collects data in a log file to let you experiment with battery life. You can selectively enable /disable the following functions. They are all the tricks I have read about for extending battery life.

Time between each shot
Backlight On or Off
Display On or Off (if your camera supports that - usually because it has an OVF)
Switch to Playback Mode between shots
Switch to Sleep mode via shortcut key
Lock autofocus

There are also some setup parameters :

Enable logging to a file
Lens retract delay time in playback mode - if the shot interval is greater thatn the retract delay, the script will switch briefly back to shooting mode from playback mode to prevent the lens from retracting
Battery stop voltage - useful once you know the effective range of your batteries to allow you to run accelerated testing by stopping at a fixed voltage level rather than waiting for the battery to expire

In addition, you can terminate any test run by pressing & holding the Menu key.

Through over 10,000 shots and a week of testing, I've made the following observations :

Test Camera : Canon A1200 Powershot (this camera's display can be turned off via the DISP button)
Batteries : 2 x AA Duracell HR6 DX1500 NiMH 1.2V 2000 mAh

I used the same set of batteries, freshly charged for each test, using a Maha MH-C204F battery charger. In each test, the camera was allowed to shoot until it was shut down by the Canon software for low voltage.

There were two test suites - one set of test was conducted at a 4 sec per shot interval and the other at a 1 minute per shot interval.

[hr]
Test Suite One
[tt]Shot Interval : 4 seconds

Trial	Setup	Results
1	no optimization	3013 shots over 3:02 hours
2	backlight off between shots	3302 shots over 3:35 hours
3	display off	4572 shots over 5:04 hours

[hr]
Test Suite Two
[tt]Shot Interval : 60 seconds

Trial	Setup	Results
1	no optimization	207 shots over 3:26 hours
2	backlight off between shots	253 shots over 4:12 hours
5	backlight off between shots, screen off via power save after 10 sec	566 shots over 9:26 hours
3	backlight off, idle in playback mode	640 shots over 10:48 hours
4	display off	811 shots over 13:30 hours

[hr]

I've just started to chart and analyze the data collected and summarized above. What I've found really surprising was the very small difference between shooting every 4 seconds and shooting every minute on the length of time the batteries lasted (trial condition one in each test suite).

Update : script updated to include sleep mode via shortcut key

miser2.lua

4.84KB