D600 battery usage, absurdly short.

<p>It's ridiculous. If I leave the D600 on, and don't even touch it, it drains a full and freshly charged Nikon battery in about 8 hours. Has anyone else experienced this? My D300s and D700 can sit unused for days, with the power switch on and still have plenty of juice.<br /><br /></p>

<p>That is not a general problem with the D600. It is an anomaly that happened to your D600, possibly due to your settings on your D600 or potential problems in your camera, the battery, or the battery charger, etc.</p>

<p>Do you have a second battery to test? And maybe yours charged on someone elses charger? Then their battery charged on your charger</p>

<p>If <strong><em>all</em></strong> batteries drain, it's a camera problem. Anything else and it's a battery/charger problem.</p>

<p>Refine the fault.</p>

<p>If it's the camera, it a serious problem in that if it drains a fully charged battery in 8 hrs, that juice is going somewhere. Stuff gets hot and dies. </p>

<p>Let's see: 1900mA divided by 8 = 237.5mA. Yep, that's quite a drain! About what I'd expect from the backlight of the rear LCD display.<br /> So, if the battery itself is up to spec and fully charged; are you sure that the rear LCD display is turning off Tom? Not sure if there's a menu setting to keep it constantly on, but it's worth a look through your menu options.</p>

<p>Then there's this: "If I leave the D600 on, and don't even touch it...." Why would you do that for a full 8 hours? And are you sure that some button or other isn't being pressed by, say, touching the side of your camera case or something?</p>

<p>Another thing that might automatically drain the battery is having an AF lens attached in continuous focus mode. But then the shutter button or AF-ON would have to be permanently pressed.</p>

<p>Oh, one more thing. New Lithium batteries should be given a lengthy charge and cycled 3 or 4 times before gaining their full capacity. A once-charged fresh-out-the-packet Lithium battery won't have anywhere near its stated mAH capability.</p>

<p>Five year ago, we had this thread about some D300 "battery problem." After a few months of frustration, it turned out to be a faulty battery charger: http://www.photo.net/nikon-camera-forum/00UyDy</p>

<p>That is probably a rare scenario, but I would explore various possibilities to pin point the actual issue. For example, if somehow your back LCD is on, I can see that it drains the battery completely after a few hours. Otherwise, the metering system should shut off atuomatically, and the top LCD is not going to drain much battery at all.</p>

<p>Doesn't the D600 have a battery charge-state indicator on the top LCD and a battery condition check in the menu? If those are both showing 100% after freshly charging the battery, then it would seem unlikely that the charger is at fault.<br>

It's still possible that the battery is faulty though, and not giving the correct capacity.</p>

<p>I'd have thought the OP would notice if the big flat thing at the back was glowing like a small lighthouse?</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>Five year ago, we had this thread about some D300 "battery problem."</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>...and a year before that (2008) Nikon had to implement a Firmware update on the D300 'cos it didn't report the correct battery state....a false 'I'm Dead' message.</p>

 

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<p>http://www.photo.net/nikon-camera-forum/00Q19n</p>

</blockquote>

<p>The battery/camera might be in need of a calibration cycle although I'm not sure how one would go about it. This will occur if the battery is mostly recharged in a partial-discharge state and rarely allowed to discharge completely.</p>

<p>Most modern laptops have a "battery calibration" feature accessible in BIOS. Enabling it will cause the machine to cycle though a full discharge, recharge, full discharge, recharge sequence to recalibrate the machine's fuel gauge. </p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>I'd have thought the OP would notice if the big flat thing at the back was glowing like a small lighthouse?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Not during day time or the camera is inside a camera bag the whole time, for example. The LCD could be on for several hours and you don't notice. There could be a GPS unit connected to the camera and drains your battery like crazy ....</p>

<p>And of course the battery maybe defective, the camera could be defective ....</p>

<blockquote>

<p>It's ridiculous. If I leave the D600 on, and don't even touch it, it drains a full and freshly charged Nikon battery in about 8 hours.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>This reads as if it's not a one off event....and I'd hope if the OP has such a gizmo, he'd have mentioned it.</p>

<p>If I leave my D5300 with the internal GPS Track Log ON, it drains the poor thing overnight.</p>

<p>I use a D600 every week, and have any number of batteries. They all can go many weeks between charging. Even if I leave the camera "on," it will go nicely to sleep and preserve those batteries for a long, long time. The only thing that runs them down is lots of live view use (including mostly video use), or constant chimping. If AF is doing a lot or racking back and forth with a big lens, and VR is busy humming away for lots of shooting time, that adds up too. But just sitting there? In practical terms, no impact at all on battery charge. If that's happening, something's not right with the camera and/or the battery.</p>

<p>"There could be a GPS unit connected to the camera and drains your battery like crazy ...." - In that case I'm glad that I went with a Bluetooth option for GPS location. I was initially a bit worried about the battery drain, since the Bluetooth gizmo connects via the constantly on 5v supply from the 10 pin connector. Anyway, after leaving the GPS unit connected for over 12 hours, it turned out that the battery drain amounted to a 2% drop according to the camera's battery meter.</p>

<p>wow. this is an active forum :^). <br /><br />Reading all the posts, I think I have a camera problem. All functions have been set to minimize power consumption. Preview has been turned off. Today I deliberately turned the thing off and in about 8 hours the battery (which read "full" at insertion), was completely dead. I have two batteries, they both act this way. The camera does not feel warm, ever. Sigh. Looks like Nikon will get another $250 from me, and if past experience with Nikon repair persists, I'll still have this problem 6 months from now. <br /><br />Thanks for all the considered replies. The sad thing is, I've never really liked the D600... t </p>

<p>Probably a short circuit somewhere in the camera is draining the batteries. If you’ve had previous problems with the body perhaps Nikon should be nice to you and replace it as a lemon.</p>