i recently bought a camera && i've had it for about a couple of weeks.
i put the battery to charge & noticed within a couple of minutes the red light when off. this should mean the battery is charged, correct?
i turn on the cam & i'll take one picture & the cam shutts off.
but it lets me turn it back on.
i dont think i need a new battery because i've only had for a couple of days.
whats wrong with my cam????!!! I think here are three possibilities.
The most obvious possiblity is that you didn't insert the battery correctly in the charger. If the pins didn't connect snugly, it's quite possible for one of them to come away from the charger contacts and the light will go out making it look like you've got a full charge. The first thing to make sure is that you did insert the battery correctly into the charger.
The second possibility is that your charger has a problem. I've had a bad charger once, it burned out as I was using it on the first battery. The other possibility is that your battery is defective and is not taking a full charge. It's very unlikely that your camera is defective.
So what to do? If you're handy electrically, you can put a meter on the charger terminals to see if you're getting an output according to the information label on the device. If you're not getting anything it is most likely the charger. What you can also do is just reinsert the battery again and set it to charge. If the charger is burned out the red light probably won't even turn on.
If you are getting the right voltage, or the red light does turn on, put the battery in the charger and leave it there for a while making sure it's inserted properly. Your instructions will likely tell you how long it takes to charge the battery. The time frame is usually from an hour to about three hours depending on the kind of battery and its capacity. See if, after the prescribed amount of time you have a charge.
The best way to see if the battery is properly charged is to look at your battery indicator in the camera (usually on your LCD). When you first turn it on you'll most likely see a full charge indication even if the battery is almost dead. That's pretty normal.
So now zoom in and out a couple of times, maybe take a picture or two, then look at the battery indicator. At this point if the battery isn't fully charged the indicator will show you that. If the indicator still shows a full charge on the battery you're probably ok now assuming that the symptoms have gone away.
If the symptoms are still there will a fully charged battery that shows fully charged on the LCD, you may have a camera problem. In this case I'd double check first to make sure the battery is fully seated in the camera. If it is and you still have the problems then it's got to be the camera.
If you don't want to be bothered with any of the above, I'd say take the camera back to where you bought it. Some retailers will replace it under warranty with another of the same model if the camera failed in the first week or two. So that might get you a replacement. Other retailers will simply send it for warranty repairs which means you'll lose the camera for a week or so but when it comes back whatever is broken will work.
I hope that helps a little. Good Luck! Some chargers flash a red, amber or other color light while charging. Upon completion the light either becomes a steady light or in most cases turns to a steady green light. im not sure what about the red light but it sounds like you need to charge it more This happened to me twice with two different brands of cameras. It seems to happen once you change the batteries, in my case the camera would turn on but the shutter wouldn't open nor would it take pictures but when hooked up to the computer I was able to get my pictures. I bought one on ebay so I was screwed, the other I sent back to Walmart and got a refund. Someone told me to look for a digital with no moving parts, such as the shutter and zoomlens. it might be a bad battery | 