battery drain

gmoors

Hi guys

Hopefully you can help me with this problem:

In March 2015 I bought a D4s and a spare battery (EN-EL18a). I never had any issue with the batteries. This year, in July, I bought a third battery (to be sure to have power on my trip to Iceland so I wouldn't end up in places where I couldn't recharge and so... end up with empty batteries).

My three batteries have been working well until some three weeks ago.
The batteries lasted for weeks (I mainly do automotive, autosport and landscape photography).
I noticed that a fully charged battery just lasted one week, while not even using the camera. It (the camera - and yes, it was turned off) just was laying on a shelf...

I've read some issues with the D4 and battery drain due to some network settings switched on. I've checked that specific setting on my D4s but it wasn't enabled.

Is my D4s draining the batteries or is the charger MH-26 causing the problems? Can someone help me or give me some advice or tell me what to do?

I've been looking on the net and several Nikon sites but I can't find anything appropriate.

NSXTypeR

I don't own a D4s, but generally speaking you'd want to try and do a hard reset on the camera just to make sure it's not certain settings causing this problem. It's less likely your camera, more likely the battery considering it's only that battery giving you problems.

Not sure if any other members with a D4/D4s can give you more help on this.

Ironheart

@gmoors Which firmware version do you have? Nikon is currently at 1.32.
Do your batteries call for calibration when you insert them into the charger? (page 459 in the manual)
Check the battery info in the setup menu with each of your batteries. You can see whether they are in need of calibration and the relative age of the cells. (page 365)

gmoors

Hello Ironheart.
The current firmware version installed on my camera is 1.30. Tomorrow I'm going to upgrade to firmware 1.32 (had already seen in this site that there's a new firmware).
The charger hasn't called for calibration, once in the camera all three batteries show positive info: the battery life status is 0 (new).

But I've exectuted a calibration myself with the batteries... I assume that's not a problem? Even if the charger didn't notice me it wasn't neccesary...

Ironheart

@gmoors the "battery age" is determined by the intelligent charging chip on the battery itself. It knows the status of each of the cells and it knows if the battery is functioning properly. If it wasn't, it would raise the age appropriately. So knowing your batteries are okay, I'd suspect some function of the camera being enabled that is unnecessarily draining your juice. You can try the two-button reset, you can also go through every setting and find the ones that are not defaults (marked with a *) and understand what effect that might have on battery life.

I still think you might have network enabled. In the "Network" menu, you need to go into the the "Network Connection" submenu even though it says "OFF" (I think this means "no connection") and make sure that you explicitly select "Disable". Worth checking anyway.

gmoors

@Ironheart I've double checked the network settings but found nothing awkward. Some hour ago I've reset the settings of my camera and also deleted my menu "A" settings. The firmware is also updated to the latest version for the D4s.
Hopefully everything now is solved.

I'll keep you informed.
Many thanks already for your info and reactions.