I spent some time on the phone with a guy at Crystal Images which is a
company that does primarily white water rafting and skiing pictures. They
are based in Big Sky, Montana and work there and in Wyoming (Grand
Targhee)in the winter. It gets very cold at both places. They have gone to
Nikon digital cameras because they already had a lot of Nikon lenses. He
said that if they were starting from scratch Canon probably has the better
digital equipment. They have been using Nikon D1 and D2H bodies and will be
buying some D1X bodies this year. There are two areas where they have had
trouble with the cold. Batteries are the number one problem and they
probably get about three times as many images per battery charge in warm
weather than they do when it's cold. They have designed a custom battery
pack that stays inside the coat where it's warm but have had some failure
problems with that too. He didn't think that failure was temperature related
but the problem resolution was still in process. The second major cold
weather deficiency is with the Type II flash cards. These are like a
miniature hard drive, with a rotating element, and function poorly in the
cold. They have had good reliability with the Type I flash cards. They have
not had any other problems related to the cold. Their web address is:
http://www.bigskyphotos.com/ but this site does not have information on the
equipment they use. They do some really good work with racing photography.
They took a picture of my granddaughter racing at Targhee that I really
like. This link is to a low resolution scan of it.
http://myweb.cableone.net/jmac25/sports.htm
/jim
<<snip
> Hi,
>
> I wonder if manufacturers of digital cameras will bother with the
challenges of
> one last frontier; cold.
>
> Mechanical cameras rule the roost in the polar and alpine regions, and
> anywhere there is severe cold.
>
> Brian
>
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