Anyone tried Battery Kings DCS Pro batteries?

Hi,

All right! Another happy ending!

Stan

Finally figured out how to post images. This is tedious, but seems to work, at least.

Well, it seemed to give a bit more sitting time, and maybe a few more shots... but still fairly short battery life in terms of frames, and, when this one went dead, it did it suddenly - the camera just died, and lost the last two frames I'd shot. When I installed the other battery, the camera body itself showed Err until I hit the shutter release. I guess the battery died in the middle of winding the shutter/mirror. Meh.

Looks like the voltage levels are not the same as the original battery, the low voltage cutout seems to be at a higher voltage than the original, maybe the whole battery works a tad higher and you got meh results because the charger cannot fully charge the new pack due to low voltage.

You can easily test this by charging the cells externally and comparing the number of shots or measuring the voltage at full charge when charger externally or with the kodak charger.

I think it's much more likely that the problem is cascading the management circuits. Letting the cell's management circuit cut off rather than allowing the camera to get battery state information the battery's original management circuit.

That can be also a problem, i'd check for voltages and see how both management circuits work, you don't want to mismatch cells and managements circuits, at best you gonna get poor performance by doing so, at worst... fireworks.

This FMA battery is an exact replacement, without its own management circuit. Also claims to use Sanyo cells. www.ebay.com/itm/323006619753

Price is not bad ($24). Shipping looks like it may take a while. There's also the question of how old these cells are...

I wouldn't go with old batteries, not because of sitting time, good quality Li-Ion tend to remain in very good shape, i've seen this on laptop batteries, but older batteries holds a lot less charge than newer ones, technology has advanced a lot on this subject.

On my D1x y modded some 18650 and it gives a lot more shots than Nickels, i have to charge them externally but I consider the change a big improvement.

You might want go that route in order to keep your newer packs that might not be so compatible with the original charger.

Are you saying that you do know how old these batteries are? How can you tell?

If there's not a date code or something like that then you don't know, but seemingly they are the same as the one on the original DCS, so they are probably old tech by today standards.

I got the new ones. They are physically basically identical to the originals... except that the originals seems to have swollen a bit and these are perfectly flat. They are marked Sanyo Japan, while the originals only say Japan.

Panasonic bought Sanyo about 10 years ago, but they kept the Sanyo name on some products after that. Panasonic does make a 103450 cell now, and it's supposed to be a very good one, but the only place I found where I could buy less than 500 of them is from New Zealand. I suspect that the Sanyo cells I got will at least restore what one of these batteries were like when new. Maybe I'll swap them in this evening.

If someone else is in a location where they can more easily get the Panasonic NCA103540 cells, it would be interesting to hear your results. Note that the Panasonics are bare cells with no wires or conductive strips coming off of them. They just have a wide flat contact at one end for + and a narrow one at the other end for -.

Great, give them a try and let us know how it went

I installed the new Sanyo cells about a week and a half ago. I don't have a way to test battery capacity other than using it in the camera, and, since I don't shoot that much with that camera, my experience is pretty subjective, but the battery seems very good now. I've done a bit of shooting with it here and there, and I have at least turned the camera on once a day, and reviewed images and went through the menus a bit. Till now, it's still showing full battery in the display. I don't think I've gotten this much use without the battery dipping to one bar out of the other, recently purchased, NOS battery; and I certainly didn't get it from this battery before the latest rebuild.