I'm curious what the preference is for those doing photography here. Which do you think provides longer life? I've read some articles but they're all so wonderfully conflicting. I need to buy a new charger and batteries and had been using nimh AA's, but am thinking of switching to the CR-V3 for my trip. There's nothing worse than getting out in the water and finding out your batteries have little or no charge on them. Thanks ahead of time,
Shawn

I've gone to 2500mAH nimh Energizer brand and have no problem with them lasting for two dives in either camera (Oly 4040) of strobe (DS50).

Do you have the lcd on throughout those dives? Or do you turn it on and off depending on when you want to take a picture? I used NIMH on my last trip but lately my NIMH ones haven't been keeping a charge. They've only been charged maybe 10 times so they shouldn't lost it. I know they lose a lot of power sitting for a month but some of these i'll just charge and they don't even power the camera up. I'm thinking it's more the charger and I should just buy me a new one, but figured if i had to buy a new one i'd see what people's opinions are of the cr-v3 versus the nimh.

I used the 2500mAH, but have learned some important lessons...

1. Make sure that the charger you are using is actually charging to 2500 mAH capacity (a tester on the battery after charging should confirm)

2. Once in a while a 2500 cell will fail. On the 13th dive of our last trip, on 11/13, I got exactly 13 shots on a freshly charged set of batteries and then the camera crapped out with a low battery warning. It was enough to give me triscadecaphobia.

Thus, test, test, test before using.

I use NiMH AAs in my Oly C5050. I easily get 2 60+ minute dives out of a set of 2500s and I have pushed 3 dives with no problems. I keep the display on all the time but it does auto shutdown after several minutes of non use. It is possible that a cell will fail prematurely. I have had several do that. I also use them in my strobe so I have a lot of batteries. The latest NiMH I have seen are 2700mAh. I keep all the batteries as a set. When I buy new batteries I mark them with fingernail polish and always keep them together as a set. They get used, charged and stored together. If one goes bad, I chunk all of them. They were from the same lot and used exactly the same so the rest are suspect.