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Photography Culture

Modern Camera Battery Life is Pretty Bad. Here’s Why.

Chris Gampat
No Comments
03/20/2023
3 Mins read
Chris Gampat The Phoblographer Battery Mags review 3.51-1250s400

Last Updated on 03/20/2023 by Chris Gampat

Modern cameras are far more capable than smartphones. I’m not talking about DSLRs here, as the optical viewfinders let them have great battery life. But modern mirrorless cameras do so much these days that the battery life has to keep up. Indeed, even as pretty much all cameras received new battery boosts in the past decade, new things have continued to drain the performance. Let’s dive into why this is such a problem.

The Hungry, Hungry Battery

When mirrorless cameras came about, they needed major boosts. Suddenly there was a full-time electronic viewfinder or screen that needed to be powered up all the time. It’s why older Sony cameras were partially so bad. The joke was that you’d buy a camera, a lens, and seven batteries. Except that it really wasn’t a joke. But then when that issue around camera battery life was solved, manufacturers started to push what the cameras could do.

Massive Performance Boosts

Pushing the possibilities of camera batteries was a great idea for a few years. Suddenly AI features started to come in that involved more processing power. On top of that, more megapixels and everything that’s done to high ISO image quality also required more from the processor. In turn, camera processors started taking up a whole lot more battery life.

Combine this with a slew of other things that photographers do that drain camera battery life such as:

  • Continuous autofocus: cameras used to need to only focus once. But these days, a lot of photographers don’t even bother with single autofocus settings. Instead, they keep it on all the time, and this drains battery life. You don’t truly feel this until you’ve been shooting an event for three or four hours. After that period of time, even Canon cameras, with their incredible battery life, can start to degrade. Combine this with the fact that your back is probably killing you because you haven’t done core workouts, and there’s a bigger argument for not using continuous autofocus.
  • WiFi and Bluetooth is on and not putting the camera into airplane mode: Cameras can, in different ways, search for connections.
  • Not dimming their screens or viewfinders: Seriously, how many of you dim your screens? Viewfinders over the years have really increased in resolution.
  • Exposure preview settings being applied: Lots of folks use mirrorless cameras because of the exposure preview setting.
  • Shooting at higher ISOs: High ISOs take more processing power from the camera than lower ISO settings do.
  • AI settings: Cameras are constantly referencing databases when using scene detection modes.
  • Let’s not get into how some people shoot portraits at 20 frames a second.

All of these things take a lot more battery life than what older cameras used to face. On top of all this there are things like an electronic shutter, mechanical shutters moving a whole lot faster, and so much more.

Camera Battery Life Has to Improve

Modern cameras are only getting more complicated. In the next year or two, you’ll start to see reviewers complain about camera battery life because the cameras are just too complicated overall. This is why manufacturers should start seriously looking at the problem now. If people are changing the way that they shoot, the manufacturers have to adapt. Hopefully, those camera batteries will improve without making the bodies much larger and without the need to completely replace older batteries. In this way, Canon did the best job of anyone.

AI autofocus battery life camera battery life Cameras Exposure Preview performance sony
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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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