Building a battery replacement

Well the situation is I have an Olympus FE-130 digital camera that I mainly use for taking pictures and videos of various projects I am working on.

My problem is that the camera goes through batteries like crazy, on average a pair of decent quality AA alkaline batteries will last 45 minutes with no use of the flash which is ridiculous.
Now I could of course use more expensive batteries or use rechargeable batteries but.. well it's just a pain in the arse, in my lab I have easy access to mains power.

So when I go looking for a power adaptor I find it quite easily, however the cost of the cable and power supply is stupid, something in the range of £70 which is totaly not worth the money, who the hell makes a cable that costs 40 odd pound, well obviously Olympus does.

So I then decide to build my own, at first I thought the connector was a mini USB, however it turns out it is another one of them no-name connectors.
The only thing I have to fit this is my data transfer cable which I don't really want to touch.


Anyways, I now want to go through the battery compartment which should be pretty easy, the problem however is that I would prefer not to solder directly to the connectors, so what should I do ?

The two options I have thought of so far are:
1. Cut open and empty two AA batteries to make a false battery which a wire can be soldered to.
2. Use some kind of premade thing that does the same thing as I would prefer not to spend my time cutting open batteries.

So what should I do ?

Why on earth would you cut open AA batteries to make AA blanks?? Think about it for a moment.. Go to a hardware store, go to the wood department and spend 1.50 on a piece of wood doweling approximatly the size of AA batteries, cut to an appropriate length, use a band saw or dremel tool or what not to cut a slit down the length of the dowling pieces for wires to run and use de-enamled brass tacks or steel tacks for electrical contacts on the ends of the batteries. I've done this before, works great. Blanks aren't even really needed, you can just run the 3V supply directly to the contacts on the camera itself, only two of them are required the other two are just a bus bar, I've tucked raw wire underneath the battery contacts to do this a few times. I've converted several devices from battery to wall power this way.

You make a very good point, I did not think of using wood for some reason.
Also getting to the battery contacts is very hard without entirely taking the camera apart which I don't really want to do.
I will get some wood.