Does very high ISO significantly reduce DSLR battery life during a night timelapse?
Asked 7/26/2016
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2 answers
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I’m shooting a night timelapse on a Canon 6D using RAW frames, Magic Lantern intervalometer, 8-second exposures, and high ISO (around 10000), with noise reduction disabled. A nearly full battery lasted a little over 1000 frames, which seems lower than expected.
Does using a very high ISO meaningfully increase battery drain, or is exposure time the main factor? If I switched to a faster lens and lowered ISO substantially while keeping the same exposure time, would battery life improve much, or would the difference be negligible?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
10y ago
2 Answers
7
SImple answer: not to a measurable extent.
Difficult answer: A high ISO-equivalent setting cranks the analog gain up. More gain requires more power per electron (or milliVolt if you prefer), but there's going to be far fewer electrons in each pixel bucket. A low ISO-equiv. setting will apply less gain to more electrons.
That said, if you're in ShutterPriority mode, what I just wrote is no longer true, as you'll collect the same charge regardless of the follower amp gain. However, unless there's something seriously wrong with the analog circuit design, the power draw to support high-gain modes (not the power drawn in applying gain to pixel signals) should not be noticeably different from the power in low-gain modes.
In sum, without knowing the exact circuitry and operational logic in a given camera, it's just about impossible to estimate the actual difference in power draw vs. ISO-equiv setting. But, compared with things like LCD display, shutter/aperture/focus auto-measurements, writing to the SD card, etc. the analog gain power is pretty much insignificant.
Originally by user25396. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user25396
10y ago
0
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High ISO by itself should have little to no measurable effect on battery life in this situation. The main battery drain is from the camera being active for long exposures, plus normal processing and writing RAW files to the card.
With noise reduction off, there usually isn’t much extra power used just because the analog gain is set higher. If dark-frame subtraction or strong in-camera noise reduction were enabled, that could increase power use a lot more.
So for an 8-second night timelapse, exposure time and total camera activity matter far more than ISO setting. Switching to a faster lens and lowering ISO while keeping the same 8-second exposure would probably not improve battery life much. It may help image quality, but not battery endurance in any major way.
Saving RAW also uses more power than smaller files because there is more data to process/write, and the camera still generates a preview image.
In short: for your setup, don’t expect a meaningful battery-life gain from lowering ISO alone; longer exposure time, RAW shooting, and any extra processing are the bigger factors.
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