D80 internal "clock" battery blues

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  • #2808
    Choc-Ful-A
    Participant

    I just got back from an 8 day driving vacation that was essentially a big loop from San Francisco to mountains in the north east part of California, up to Ashland Oregon, then down the Pacific coast on the return. It was a great trip with very few hiccups and I took lots of photos along the way.

    But there was one camera related problem along the way which prevented me from taking photos in Ashland and nearly scuttled photos for the rest of the trip down the coast.

    It turns out there’s a second battery buried deep inside the body of the D80 which does various, basic, functional things like keep a clock going. And sometimes they go bad, unexpetedly and without warning, like mine did. If that happens, you’re completely out of luck. The camera will not function without a working “clock battery” even with a fully charged regular battery in place. It appears to take photos, despite various error codes and symbols, but nothing is saved to the SD card.

    And while newer Nikon’s seem to be designed to make it easy to change this critical internal battery, that’s not the case for D80’s. Replacing the battery is undoubtedly simple, but getting to it is another story… You have to take the things apart, including removing circuit boards to reach the thing. The folks that helped me figure out that the internal battery was the culprit found a YouTube video of someone doing the repair and it was absurd.

    So tomorrow I’m going to pack up the D80 and send it back to it’s maker for a check-up and repair. Something like ~6 weeks later it will reappear shiny and refurbished. The estimated cost for this sort of check-up and repair for this mode camera is about $250, ouch…

    But getting back to the vacation, while we were driving to Eureka, California we passed a mall with a decent department store in a town called Grants Pass. So after a short detour to that store, and another stop in the local Radio Shack, we resumed the drive with a shiny new D3100 and a universal car charger breathing life into the battery. By the time was arrived in Crescent City I was taking photos again.

    The good news is I at least got to take photos along the cost, even if it was with a new camera I wasn’t familiar with. Also, I can continue to shoot with the D3100 while the magic elves in Nikonland repair my D80. And someone in my family is getting a really nice, if slightly used, Christmas present.

    The only thing I don’t like about the D3100 is that when I plug it into my Linux system via USB cable it doesn’t appear as a mounted filesystem, like the D80 does. Instead there’s some obnoxious special mechanism for accessing the device that only certain applications know how to use. So I have to pull the SD card out and use a USB card reader to transfer photos. I’m not a fan of this particular “progress”.

    #48954
    Barracuda
    Participant

    Sucks to hear that the D80’s battery is so difficult to replace. Wonder what led to that design, couldn’t imagine that one engineer could slip such a poorly thought out solution through unless cost, space, or something else was a driving factor. Look forward to seeing your pics from both cameras soon.

    #48955
    caradoc
    Participant

    The only thing I don’t like about the D3100 is that when I plug it into my Linux system via USB cable it doesn’t appear as a mounted filesystem, like the D80 does. Instead there’s some obnoxious special mechanism for accessing the device that only certain applications know how to use. So I have to pull the SD card out and use a USB card reader to transfer photos. I’m not a fan of this particular “progress”.

    The D3100 is permanently stuck in PTP mode, not Mass Storage mode. It’ll appear under Linux as a camera device if you have a driver loaded.

    http://ptp.sourceforge.net

    #48956
    chupathingie
    Participant

    The only thing I don’t like about the D3100 is that when I plug it into my Linux system via USB cable it doesn’t appear as a mounted filesystem, like the D80 does. Instead there’s some obnoxious special mechanism for accessing the device that only certain applications know how to use. So I have to pull the SD card out and use a USB card reader to transfer photos. I’m not a fan of this particular “progress”.

    The D3100 is permanently stuck in PTP mode, not Mass Storage mode. It’ll appear under Linux as a camera device if you have a driver loaded.

    http://ptp.sourceforge.net

    That’s a horribly user-hostile way to design a device. That sounds more like something Sony would do.

    #48957
    lokisbong
    Participant

    Hey you went through my old stomping grounds. Did you spend much time in Crescent City Ca? Bummer about that way internal battery. thats a moronic way to design something. It’s almost like they want you to send the camera in for something which shouldn’t need a tech person on most cameras.

    edited to ad I just looked for a backup/clock battery on my T1i and cant find one so my Canon will probably need the same tech service if that battery dies too. bummer.

    #48953
    Choc-Ful-A
    Participant

    The only thing I don’t like about the D3100 is that when I plug it into my Linux system via USB cable it doesn’t appear as a mounted filesystem, like the D80 does. Instead there’s some obnoxious special mechanism for accessing the device that only certain applications know how to use. So I have to pull the SD card out and use a USB card reader to transfer photos. I’m not a fan of this particular “progress”.

    The D3100 is permanently stuck in PTP mode, not Mass Storage mode. It’ll appear under Linux as a camera device if you have a driver loaded.

    http://ptp.sourceforge.net

    I assumed it was something like that and I find that “design” offensive. There’s no reason to invent some special purpose protocol for transfering pictures when plain old USB disk emulation works just fine.

    Luckily this is a temporary camera for me, otherwise I’d be tempted to harrass Nikon for making such a poor design choice that constrains the way people use the hardware they purchased.

    #48952
    Choc-Ful-A
    Participant

    Hey you went through my old stomping grounds. Did you spend much time in Crescent City Ca? Bummer about that way internal battery. thats a moronic way to design something. It’s almost like they want you to send the camera in for something which shouldn’t need a tech person on most cameras.

    edited to ad I just looked for a backup/clock battery on my T1i and cant find one so my Canon will probably need the same tech service if that battery dies too. bummer.

    Crescent City was just a lunch stop on the trip from Ashland Or to Eureka Ca. So we were just there long enough to take photos at the harbor, then drive to the other side of the harbor to have lunch. And of course take more photos… Then it was one last pit stop for coffee/tea at Dutch Brothers (a cool regional chain) before heading south.

    As for clock batteries, the fact that it’s difficult to replace it somewhat annoying. But what really made me crazy was that the camera won’t work at all without it. There’s really no excuse for that design. Even if certain functionality is lost, the camera SHOULD work with the regular battery in place. If I could have set the clock and reconfigured it every time I took out the battery I could have limped through the rest of the trip. For whatever reason, the engineers at Nikon decided to make the camera do everything normally except save the photo to the SD card when the clock battery goes.

    Also, I just chedk the shutter count on the last photo the D80 took for grins… It took 13745 photos before the battery went. That doesn’t sound like a lot to me, since it’s easy to take hundreds of shots in a single day. But at least it make 5 digits before it died!

    And the last shot it managed to capture is pretty fitting, it’s a shot of a fisherman at sunset taken from the Sundial bridge in Redding.

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