Just curious to know, how many shot u can take from a battery?
Back in my Atpus 22 Contax days, I used those big honking double sized batteries, that kind of looked like a GMC truck battery hanging out from the bottom and could get about 300 frames before they got goofy, though I had to be careful with knocking the camera around as they are heavy and hang below the back and every now and then would lose connection.
I also found the third party batteries were not that consistent. One would last a long time, others not so much.
I did find that with the Contax battery life, (as well as shooting speed) depended on whether I autofocused or used manual focus. On manual everything went faster, on auto slower and I noticed this tethering also.
To me if the Aptus had one fault, it was the battery placement because it gets in the way of the firewire connection, so I guess that's why you can't use a battery and a computer both for power when tethering.
If the Aptus had a strong point it was the look of the files, especially the A22. Under the right conditions I loved the way they produced skin tones and always shot it at 200 iso, even though it added some noise, it was to me very pretty. The two downsides was I couldn't see the image on the back of the camera when tethering. I got tired of always running back to the computer station to see so I finally made a tripod powerbook station that I kept next to the camera (when possible) so I could see the image and tethered a 30" monitor to another station for the clients to view. The second issue was the A22 would moire quickly, but if shot only beauty I would have used it forever.
The real positives of the Aptus is the touch screen interface is very well thought out (mostly), and though the preview is rough, at least it's big. Also if you shot black and white you could set it to see black and white, which my Phase plus backs won't do.
BC
