6V is too much. You will need to drop it down to 5V. Placing a protection diode between the battery and the camera should do the trick. Any diode that has a forward voltage of about 1V like the 1N400x series of diodes will be perfect.

5V inside your computer doesn't necessarily equate to 5V at the end of a USB cable plugged into your computer; there can be assorted devices ranging from fuses to electronic switches that can reduce the voltage "some." Also, many laptops work mostly on 3.3V these days, so the 5V may not be as regulated as it was in the old days...

Ohh, right. Thanks for clearing that up.

The specs for a PC PSU are for +/-5%. So the actual output of the 5V rail can be anywhere from 4.75V to 5.25V, if its a good quality PSU. Cheaper PSUs can be as bad as 8% or 10%. But the PC and USB devices will still operate fine at that level. As mentioned the voltage out the end of the USB cable will be slightly lower due to resistance.

3.3 volts, or 2.7 volts is what the CPU uses... regulated down from the power supply's 5V bus...

USB ports are supposed to deliver up to 1 amp but typically the desktops will share a 1 or 2 amp power supply among two or more ports...

Worse yet many laptops reduce that output to about 1/4 amp.

SOME phones (and my Motorola Droid are among them) won't charge from 5 volts... their chargers run between 5.5 and 5.7 v

Or I should have said they won't charge from shutdown voltage from a USB port... once they have a partial charge they can use a lower voltage to complete charging....

If your "device" needs a voltage more tightly regulated than "4.5 to 5.5V", 3.3V is the closest "standard" voltage to aim for without fancy voltage regulators. There's a good chance the iPod is 3.3V on most of its internal circuitry...