Camera battery requirements

[Shortsighted]

 Batteries are everywhere: cellphones, hearing aids, pacemakers, sex toys, but they are seldom included, unless you buy a camera.  My first digital camera was a point-and-shoot and came with one battery.  Buying a second battery was expensive and only came in black, like a Ford Model-T.  I expected more choice.  I started carrying a second battery in the field in case the one in the camera was low on juice, as occasionally happened when I failed to charge it, or worse still when I left it at home in the charger.  My spare was always in a small zip-lock bag in the pocket of my camo jacket and I only removed it when I washed the jacket, or when I tossed it into the dryer after every outing to de-tick it.  Once, I failed to remove it from the dedicated pocket and tossed the jacket into the dryer ... cunk, cunk, cunk ... oops! I quickly retrieved it.  That was close.  Leaving a battery in a dryer set on “high” is not smart, just like watching “The World According to Cunk” can leave you a little bewildered.  I suppose that the noise could have been more like ... dumb, dumb, dumb, but that might have been drowned-out by the noise in my head.
 
 
 My current DSLR has two batteries and I never once tried to torture the spare.  A bird photographer I met in the field was complaining that his Canon R5 Mk II would go through so many batteries that he had to get one of those belts that normally carry shotgun shells and fill it with spare batteries, each costing $125.00.  I don’t know what colour his batteries were.  I am tactless at the best of times and told him that anyone that can afford an R5 Mk II can afford a magazine full of spare batteries.  He really didn’t want to hear that appraisal.  He was bigger than me and younger than me but I could run faster because I wasn’t burdened by the weight of all those batteries. 
 
 
 I believe that he was considering a clip-on battery pack which has a much greater reserve capacity.  I don’t even want to know what one of those things cost. That got me thinking about all power-hungry mirrorless cameras. Sure, they may manage hundreds of frames per charge, but when one is shooting at 20 – 40 frames/second it doesn’t take long to reach their designated limit.  The electronic viewfinder is bright and power hungry.  No wonder this birder needed so many batteries.  I suppose one could reduce the burst rate and save power, but does anyone with a $5,000 camera really do that?  Does a full-frame mirrorless camera use more power than a cropped-frame mirrorless camera?  Does anyone on this forum who owns a mirrorless camera have a battery drain problem?  Does switching to a high-burst-rate mirrorless camera mean getting a part-time job?  Does wearing a battery bandolier make one look pretentious?  How many questions am I allowed to ask? 
 
 

[Dr. John]

My Lumix point-and-shoot comes with its own rechargeable battery pack.  It lasts quite awhile and I just need to keep an eye on the charge level so I don't run out on a vacation day with lots of picture taking.

[Shortsighted]

A PAS camera with a battery is so ordinaire, while one with a battery packis some serious piece of compact kit.  Do Lumix cameras still carry lenses made by Leitz, or is it Leica?

[Dr. John]

Leica it appears nowadays.

[Shortsighted]

Ah yes, quite right ... Leica.  I remember clearly in the 1970's the awe associated with the name "Leica".  Although Leica was late to designing an SLR film camera when compared to the products offered by the Japanese, having made rangefinder cameras whereby the principle lens only captures the image for the film and the viewfinder is a separate window adjacent to the lens for composing your photograph.  The principle lens was usually a slight wide-angle, say 35mm, so the offset was immaterial.  These old-fashioned rangefinder designs were selling for far more than the state-of-the-art SLR cameras from Japan, which were the most popular cameras.  Contax and Zeiss Icon from (West) Germany did have SLR offerings but at considerably higher coast as well.  The Leica came out with the Leicaflex, a cleanly designed SLR at over $2,000. when the Japanese king was a Nikon F at just over $500.  What a difference in price!   Canon also had an SLR but it was heavy and unpopular.  My Minolta SLR was about $300. and that seemed like a lot of money back in 1968.  I've never used a Leica so I don't know what it feels like, but the reverence for the brand remained for years.  I assuaged my longing for German-made gear by buying a Linhof tripod, which I still have.  While hopelessly out-dated by today's standard of technology, I still love it.  That's another sign of getting old ... loving old gear.

The way that I understand it, Leica and Panasonic have an arrangement, like a collaboration, whereby Leica does not make the lenses but allows Panasonic to make them strictly to Leica standards and they can thereby cash in on the Leica name.  I would really like to know how different lenses of the same configuration compare, including Leica, Leitz, Zeiss, Canon, Nikkor, and third-party lenses by Tamron and Sigma and then graph the results to reveal "bang-for-the-buck".