Sony camera users have known for a long time that the battery life on their cameras tends to be pretty bad overall. This is especially the case with their mirrorless camera lineup. If you’re using your Sony camera professionally, you’re going to need to bring a lot of batteries with you to a gig if it’s a day long event. But if it’s a quicker gig, then it does the job.
Of course, there are many things you can do to get just a bit more juice out of your camera.
For starters there are things that are a bit more minor, like dimming your camera’s screen and viewfinder if you don’t need it at the brightest setting. Sony’s cameras also have an option called Sunny Weather which makes the screen its brightest. Let’s be honest, most people don’t need this. Then there are other options like turning on the airplane mode so that it doesn’t search for WiFi connections constantly.
Other ideas here include using a specific focusing point. For example, consider a situation where you’re using the wide focusing area. The camera then needs to figure out what spot to focus on. But if you use a more finely chosen specific focusing spot, it will work faster and hone in on that area. Therefore, it uses less battery and you can get more out of the camera in real life use.
Many other camera manufacturers don’t have battery issues the way Sony does. But if you’re a DSLR user, then know that your cameras shouldn’t have as many issues mostly due to one thing: the optical viewfinder. It makes everything consume much less power. Mirrorless cameras on the other hand need to always power up an LCD screen or a viewfinder, so they’re burning more energy. Manufacturers are going to have to find a way to fix this problem.