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General discussion

4 AA or proprietary li-ion batts required for fast flash?

May 23, 2007 4:27PM PDT

I read a comment somewhere that to have fast flash recycle times, the digicam's gotta have either 4 AA batteries or a proprietary li-ion battery since those 2 types will be able to recharge the flash quickly. Is this completely true, true for the most part, or just false? If false, please also provide a counter example model of a digicam.

I've tried out some digicams a while back that take 2 AA batts (of course, the batts in the demo models probably varied) and noticed flash recycle times ranged anywhere from 5.5s to 11s (using my stopwatch). Other digicams ranged from 3 to 6s. I'll need to go back sometime and take note of the model and batt types they used, but it seems like this makes sense and something I never noticed till now.

Discussion is locked

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depends
May 23, 2007 5:09PM PDT

I'd say it doesn't make much of a difference it's all how the camera handles the charge, I mean I have a canon EX big *** flash and it's recycle is pretty much instant(as fast as the camera can fire) and it uses 4 AA batterys, so I would assume the power is avaible with four AA's it's all about the circuity in the camera. but basicly your going to see the fastest recycling times on the powerzoom cameras(sometimes 4 AA's sometimes li-ion) and even faster on dslr's(which have proprietary batterys)

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Your common Alkaline battery has higher internal resistance.
May 23, 2007 10:08PM PDT
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=lion+alkaline+internal+battery+resistance&btnG=Google+Search

Be sure to review http://www.batteryuniversity.com too

But it's all moot at the end of the day. Some people have an infinite supply of AA's, some forget to charge up, others have other reasons. I like my LiON based products since I'm not paying out all the time for batteries.

Why did I mention internal resistance? In high current draws your Alkaline loses quite a bit of power due to that. Your flash units have high demands for short periods.

Bob