One of these is a fake, can you tell which? There's a lot of fail-safe margin built into IC-based solutions, and the soldering jobs on the fakes tended to be sub-par as well. We'll admit that we've used third-party batteries in our own lab in the past, especially on the lens-testing side, where we shoot many hundreds of images a week. If the price seems to be too good to be true, it probably is. You can't see it here, with all the pieces stacked together, but there were also more layers of insulators and tape on the genuine product than in the fake unit. Genuine Canon LP-E8s, made with top-quality Panasonic cells internally have a rated capacity of 1,120 mAh. (I mean, drastically.). Just tape a steel weight on top, to bring the weight up to where it should be! There was one obvious trick, though, that we found particularly amusing: An easy way to save on production costs is to simply not put as much battery-stuff inside the case! I will be back, - Product arrived on time and as described Excellent product. We encountered folded-flat boxes with a couple of sellers of "Canon" batteries, as well as the one "Nikon" seller we checked. It's not uncommon to see third-party batteries advertised with much greater capacity than the manufacturer's own products. We'd hoped to use a UBA5 for our testing, but it was outside our budget, and Vencon was just leaving for their summer company shutdown when we were starting this effort. Canon also probably recognizes that at least some people who wouldn't consider a third-party battery or charger might buy counterfeits, thinking they're simply getting a good deal on the real thing. KastarUSA Inc. an enterprise with more than 19years of manufacturing experience and excellent reputation, is a famous and professional manufacturer in lithium-ion batteries, polymer batteries, Ni-MH batteries and chargers. The bottom image shows these probes plugged into an LP-E6 pack.). I wish I'd had the time to run electrical tests on the counterfeit chargers. I didn't remotely have time to trace the circuits of the counterfeit chargers, but pretty much any design built with discrete components could fail into an always-on mode from a cold solder joint. Sloppy printing on battery cases is supposedly a giveaway for counterfeit products, but from what we found, this may no longer be the case: For the most part, the printing we saw on the counterfeits we bought was pretty clean, and there were a couple of samples that we couldn't tell from the real thing, even holding them side by side under good lighting. It was only the counterfeit and third-party units where we saw cutoff voltages noticeably higher than recommended levels. 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Copyright 1995-2022 eBay Inc. All Rights Reserved. Will a counterfeit battery melt down, explode and destroy your camera? Material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted or otherwise used without the prior written consent of The Imaging Resource. Given how convincing some of the fakes were, it seems that the only real assurance you can have that you're not getting a counterfeit product is to buy it from an authorized reseller like Amazon, B&H, Adorama or other mainstream retailers. As noted below, though, these were only as-new capacity numbers, and a significant measure of battery quality is how well they maintain their capacity over time. ), so we couldn't devote a lot of time to testing, but we did run 28 different batteries (both genuine and fake) through a couple of charge/discharge cycles, to measure their capacity. There are a host of ICs on the market that do this, and fortunately, all of the counterfeit samples we examined had at least some kind of protective circuitry inside. Other than a few obvious images that didn't look at all like the genuine articles, it was pretty much impossible to tell the fakes from the real things, based on eBay photos. Then there's the personal question of whether you want to support counterfeiters. Finally, the Canon LP-E8 packs had little fuses in the leads coming from each battery cell, seen in the bottom image. When you're trying to figure out whether a battery pack is counterfeit or not, it mainly comes down to the price, as all the ones we encountered were selling for well below the cost of the genuine article. The cells used here are considerably smaller than those used in the genuine Canon version, so it's no surprise that it had less than half the capacity of the real thing, despite being labeled as having 16% more capacity. Also a Vivitar-branded unit, this LP-E6 replacement used smaller rectangular cells, rather than the big cylindrical ones used in the real thing and all the counterfeits we happened to test. This was pretty much a spare-time project (yeah, right, "spare" time? All cells degrade over time, but if the metals and chemicals are of lower purity (or lesser agents are substituted), or manufacturing tolerances aren't held, cell capacity can deteriorate a lot more quickly than otherwise. The resulting pack would obviously feel too light in the hand, so the maker taped a chunk of steel on top of the cells, to give it the heft of the genuine article. It's clear, though, that the combination of a battery like that with an over-generous overvoltage limit and a poorly-designed charger could result in an abnormally short battery life. In the case of Li-ion cells, this means not stopping the charge at the correct voltage. 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On their website, at their recent Canon Expo, and in their online advertising, Canon U.S.A. has been calling attention to the problem of counterfeit batteries. Based on our limited testing, you may get something close to stated capacity, or you may get less than half: The worst counterfeits we tested had only 43% the capacity of the genuine products. Don't try this at home! You can to some extent trade off cycle life against higher initial capacity by using thinner electrodes to pack more surface area into the same volume. posted Wednesday, October 28, 2015 at 6:51 PM EDT. This photo shows the guts of a genuine Canon LP-E6. Our Company Slogan is "CONVENIENCE OF LIFE", meaning we will do our best to bring convenience to your life. We concentrated on the most-frequently counterfeited Canon batteries, namely the LP-E6, used in many popular Canon SLRs like the 7D, 5D Mark III, and other pro- and semi-pro models, and the LP-E8, no longer used in current camera models, but the mainstay of Canon consumer SLRs for years (from the T2i through the T5i). For example, a genuine Canon LP-E6 is $59 on Amazon, 3rd party units are only $14 or so, while counterfeits on eBay are $22-$35. (We won't dignify the counterfeits with the time required to test them). Third party companies at least have an identity of their own, some level of brand reputation to care about, and a legal entity in the US to look to in the event of problems. Are they really dangerous? The level of focus Canon, in particular, has been placing on counterfeit batteries and chargers piqued our interest, not only about the counterfeits, but about the very low-cost third-party batteries you can find on Amazon and eBay. This is a sure giveaway that the seller isn't to be trusted. It's probably no surprise, but one thing we noticed when we took the batteries apart was how much better-constructed the Canon samples were than the counterfeits. This third-party unit instead had two thin rectangular cells in their place, filling maybe half the volume inside the case. We have passed ISO9001 quality system certification and ISO 14001 environmental management system certification successively. As noted earlier, we found at least some form of protective circuitry in all of the packs we opened, and as far as we could tell, they operated as they should in the case of overcurrent and overdischarge (trying to pull too much current from the battery or to discharge it below the point at which the cells would be damaged.). Such as high-tech enterprise with "Technology Innovation Award" and state-level high-tech enterprise. Here's a shot of an LP-E8 replacement pack sold under the Vivitar brand, that we sourced from Amazon. To their credit, we didn't see any signs of counterfeit sales through Amazon or others selling through their pages, but we did purchase a couple of different brands of third-party replacement packs through them that were, uh "less than stellar" in their performance. Some efforts at legitimacy were literally laughable. The first step is to protect the individual lithium cells inside the battery pack against electrical abuse from the outside. Some counterfeits are obvious when you see them close up (but almost never in their eBay listing photos), but others are dead-ringers for the real deal. Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries pack a lot of energy into a small space, and lithium is a highly reactive element. You must have JavaScript enabled in your browser to utilize the functionality of this website. Once again, it's no surprise that the capacity was less than half that of a genuine LP-E6, despite the claimed capacity being 11% higher. The LP-E6s showed less obvious differences, although the genuine products once again had more robust, heavier solder joints, and interestingly, their contacts for power and communications were part of the protection-circuit circuit board, slipping easily out of the outer casing. Again, the most obvious giveaway is the price; they sell for a lot less than genuine ones from the camera makers. The three meters measure (from left to right) discharge current, battery voltage, and charging current, with the transistor on the black heatsink in the right rear acting as a variable load. In 2014, the US Department of Homeland Security (which now handles Customs functions in the US) reported seizing 23,140 shipments of counterfeit goods, with a total retail value of more than $1.2 billion dollars. We found that about the only way to crack open the cases was to very carefully slice along the seams with a bandsaw. It's pretty certain that counterfeits are made to lesser quality standards, though, may lack safeguards, and are likely to have lower capacity and longevity than the genuine article.
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