Sony A7 camera power consumption

Aug 20, 2022

A friend recently suggested that putting their Sony A7ii camera in airplane mode improved their battery life.

I don’t have a Sony A7ii camera, but I do have an earlier model, the Sony A7, and the right gear to test this.

The setup:

A photo of the test setup
A photo of the test setup

Results

Situation Description Power
Sleep camera fully powered off 39mW
Deep sleep camera powered off for several minutes 14mW
Viewfinder viewfinder in preview mode, auto brightness 3.30W
Screen, +0 in preview mode with default brightness 2.50W
Screen, -2 min brightness 2.43W
Screen, +2 max brightness 2.72W
Sensor off Menu, in sensor cleaning mode 1.12W
Airplane mode   2.51W
WiFi on in WPS push mode 1.63W
Continuous shooting RAW, holding the button down 4.59W
Shooting video 60i 24M, AVCHD compression 4.22W
Video playback   1.79W

Analysis

Airplane mode has no impact on power draw. When transferring files wirelessly, the camera shuts off the sensor and powers on the radio.

I was surprised to see that the viewfinder draws more power than the main display. The main display shuts down when the viewfinder is being used. It looks like this may be because the viewfinder is higher resolution than the screen.

The sleep power consumption is disappointingly high. New Sony NP-FZ100 batteries are rated at 16.4Wh, so you should get only 48 days of power-off time before the camera’s internal clock resets. I would have liked to see this power draw be in the microamps, ideally single-digit microamps.

Caveats

My test setup isn’t particularly accurate.

However, I feel like the quality of the measurements is sufficient for relative comparisons.