Lights

[beige_alert]

Did you wonder if a Canon A95 will work OK at -12°C? It sure does. Even the LCD works just fine. I spent the evening photographing the lights at the parks in downtown Milwaukee. For some reason, there were not too many other people out at 18:00, at -12°C, on Christmas Eve. I’m becoming a frequent Flickr user, and you can see some of these in my Flickr photostream.

Comments

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

Only -12°C? It was forecast to be that cold (for a high) down here today.

The worst problem you should expect to see from the cold is sharply decreased battery life. The battery doesn't work at normal efficiency when it's cold, and it probably has to work harder to move the moving parts when focusing/zooming when the lubricants are cold. The actual imaging elements work better when they're cold -- less thermal noise.

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

The professional astronomers cool their CCDs to 77K with liquid nitrogen and the serious amateurs try to get below -20°C with peltier coolers. I don't know that -12 (higher inside the electronics-packed camera) will make any noticeable difference, but, yes, in principle it's a good thing.

The lens seems to zoom and focus just fine, though the motors may draw more power. The thing I was most pleased with was that the LCD, which you really depend on with a camera like this, worked just fine. Maybe all color LCDs are pretty cold tolerant, but normal black and white LCDs get really sluggish in the cold. My MP3 player, for example, became rather hard to use, with the scrolling title smeared into a blur of grayish pixels.

I haven't actually been able to run the battery down yet. I'm sure it can be done, but even in the cold a set of four 2300 mAh NiMH cells (maybe $15 for the set if you buy good ones) will last a whole bunch of hours (and a whole bunch of megabytes), at least if you power everything down when it's not in active use. I haven't yet bought a second set of batteries. Once I do that I'll really see how long it will run on one set.