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The question of battery life as far as photo storage is concerned came up in a recent email. How many gigabytes of memory card can be loaded on a battery charge?

So I ran a couple of tests.

 TEST 1. First I filled a 40x speed 512meg CF card with 247 jpeg pictures then kept copying that same card. The test method involved turning on, allowing 20 seconds before actually answering "yes" for the copy, then about 10 seconds after the copy, turn it off and let the battery rest for about 1or 2 minutes before starting the next copy.

At the end, the unit would not start up, holding the power button caused the cycle up indication to keep starting but the system never loaded. The last few copies before that required the unit be left turned off for about 5 to 10 minutes for the battery to recover and allow the next copy.

The very last copy spent 2 minutes with a small red battery indicator and the last 20 seconds or so with a fully red indicator, but completed the copy OK.

The time to copy the full 512 meg CF card was about 3 minutes. Quickest was 2 min 59 sec and slowest was 3 min 12 sec. The indicated speed varied from 2.60 mB/s to 2.78 mB/s with the CF and HD set to "normal" transfer speed.

Summary is that about 10 gigabytes was transferred in that one battery charge. I would expect that real life use where the battery was rested for more than a few minutes between copies would allow slightly longer battery life.

My Samsung 60 gig hard drive draws 700mA, but a better choice would be a HD that drew say, 500mA if that's available. I don't think the rotational speed is an important factor, I reckon it's better to have longer battery life by using a lower power HD.

 TEST 2.The next test I did was to keep copying that same CF card without turning off the VP6210 between copies, each time a copy finished I immediately started a new one. The HD never stopped spinning during this test. On this test I got 33 copies and it died with an error on the 34th. The last 9 copies were with the battery indicator fully red. That represents nearly 17 gig transferred. The battery was warm at the end and the HD quite warm but not dangerously hot. It seems that keeping the drive spinning keeps the battery going longer, otherwise the startup surge of the hard drive helps flattens the battery faster. The elapsed time was about 100 minutes.

I also keep the LCD backlight at low brightness which will help battery life a little.

Be aware that if needing to copy a few cards one after the other, you do not need to turn off the VP6210 to remove/insert a card. I plug and unplug memory cards with the power on and never have problems with this unit.

When I get a 1 gig faster CF card some day, I will redo the tests in a more realistic fashion with about 15 to 30 minutes between copies.