Why does my camera turn off after taking 2 to 3 shots?

Sometimes - and I've just been reading about this -, weirdly enough, cameras can turn off if they basically crash and cannot write fast enough to the memory card.

I've never experienced this - only read about it. Is your memory stick of a lower class (they'll indicate this, Class 1-10 - or a rating in Mb/s)?

Have you checked the tension of the battery door spring/bracket? On my Canon Powershot S90, over time, the spring that pushes the door against the battery so it makes good contact, lost tension. Eventually, even with a freshly recharged battery pack, as soon as I turned the camera on, I'd get the "change battery pack" message, and the camera would shut down. I removed the door from the bracket/spring and gently bent it a little to add tension, and the problem was fixed.

The possible sources of error can be:

• Expired/bad quality battery (e.g. you used it beyond its operation temperature limits).
• Camera-to-battery communication is corrupted - either a circuit is faulty, or even more likely that the data connection between these two is corrupted. Check for dirt on the copper contacts of the camera and the battery. Cleaning is a good idea, just do it properly.
• You are shorting something inside the camera. This can even be a faulty SD card.

You could do a step-by-step problem elimination. If you can find someone with a camera you can use the battery of, try with those batteries and give yours to them to try in theirs. This solves the question whether it is the battery or other source that causes the problem.

Also, just measuring voltage could help, just do it properly, don't short the battery.

Also, you can just remove the memory card and test without or test with another memory card.

And please come back and tell us what the source was if you can find it out. :-)

This is a pretty late suggestion but I hope it will help anyone who's in the same situation. I experienced the same thing but in my case, the camera would turn off every time I pressed the shutter. I read on another site that it could have something to do with having an SD card.

Now for me, it had been a long time I had used the camera and the SD card I had kept isolated for a long time as well.

So what I did was take out the SD card and turned the camera back on. So far so good. Then I decided to lock the SD card before re-inserting into camera. The camera screen then popped up a message saying 'the SD card is write-protected'. I then took the SD card out and unlocked it before reinserting into camera again and abracadabra....it workded O_O

(P.S to lock the SD card, there should be a small kind of switch on the side of the card itself which you can push)