Thread: Camera Batteries

My 2 cents advice, never buy but genuine products.

Purchased battery and charger 5 years ago for around $14 IIRC both are still going. Have had one battery fail on the first charge, but at ~$9 who cares.

Martyn

Have similar experience as Martyn, cheap - non-genuine Olympus battery lasted as long as the original. - both died after 6 years or so, though in fairness, the cheapie was deceased some months before the OEM one...

Currently (sorry...) running another cheapie for a newer Olympus camera.

Depends a lot on the type/form of the battery. I've had a great run out of CR 123 re-chargeables in my LED torches. These are (or were) used in some film and digital SLR's. Bought mine from dealextreme.com and batteryjunction.com

The spare battery for my EOS dslr is a uniross brand and after 5 years still holds full charge.

The 12v chargers work but are not that great, I use a 240v pure sine inverter and connect the genuine charger, but as others have reported the knockoff batteries are fine. All my panasonic cameras have one genuine & one knockoff battery and they both spit out same no of images.
Have a quick look in the camera specific forums and find out if your particular SLR needs a battery with a chip in it, the knock off batteries don't. For that reason I bough a genuine Olympus battery for my new camera @$75.00 instead of the usual $12.00 inc post from China for a clone.

Bought two spare batteries plus charger that operates off either 12v or 240 for my Canon for $13 AUD all up.
Gave them a real thrashing on a two month photographic trip (500+ per day) without a problem and they're still going strong.

Also just purchased two spare batteries and 240v charger for HTC phone for $9 AUD all up and they are also performing OK. The external 240v charger was also able to recharge the original battery which the phone was unable to do. So I now have three working batteries for the phone.

My thoughts about the dearer batteries and chargers are that they are probably the same units that have been bought as a set and then sold off separately by some enterprising entrepreneur.