NEX-6 battery - horrible :( - Any tips?

As you say, you're going to have worse battery life with a non-DSLR (at least a non-live-view one).  Even with P&S cameras, i always carried an extra battery if I wanted to go more than 2 hours.

With the Nex-5, I find the battery life to be much better than these past cameras, but there is one setting that helped a lot.  I set the auto shut-off to one minute.  That means I have to wake it up a lot, but I am used to anticipating that I might want to use the camera and tapping the shutter lightly to wake it up before raising the camera.

Aside from that, I'm used to having a 2nd battery for big events.  It turns out that I need it less on the Nex than my old cameras, except perhaps the DSLR.  Yesterday, I was at a wedding for 3 hours and still didn't go through 1 battery.  Of course, I wasn't THE photographer, but I'm just saying that the camera got some use.  In the past, if I had a 2 hour event, I'd expect to be out of power near the end, so the Nex feels like a real improvement, although the longevity of DLSR battery life is impressive.

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Gary W.