We don't know if the pack with the bad over-voltage circuitry would have exploded if we'd kept on with the test, or if it would eventually have cut out at some voltage higher than we were willing to tempt the fates with. (We won't dignify the counterfeits with the time required to test them). Compared to counterfeits, the solder connections to the battery pack are much more robust, and circuit elements on the backside of the board are protected with a glob of epoxy. This is how a very basic 2-cell battery protection iC is connected. An overload, overcharging, physical shock or a manufacturing defect can lead to "thermal runaway". Since battery life is a competitive spec when comparing cameras from different manufacturers, camera makers naturally want to have the highest possible battery capacities consistent with safety and reasonable cycle lives. AAA+++, - Batteries exactly as described. Imaging Resource 1998 - 2022. The encyclopedic Electropaedia site lists no less than 15 categories of potential manufacturing problems for lithium batteries. Besides the obvious impact of counterfeits on legitimate jobs, some fake products can be actively dangerous. Material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted or otherwise used without the prior written consent of The Imaging Resource. Thermal runaway problems are what's behind all the burning-computer videos we've all seen on YouTube. 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. We may yet try to work a deal with them, to trade off some advertising for a unit, so we can run some cycle-life tests on third-party batteries. You can be pretty sure that these companies have been building battery packs to the highest standards, with good designs, QC procedures and protective circuitry built in, yet they all suffered instances of batteries catching fire. Of course, external protection circuits are no help if the battery cells themselves fail. If an internal short happens, pressure-relief vents (which cheap cells may not have) plus a carefully controlled manufacturing process and quality checks will help reduce the risks of an explosion. Great seller!!! We tested the batteries in two ways. The label color is different here, but there'd be no way to tell whether a "wrong" color on an eBay listing was actually the incorrect color, or just a matter of different lighting or white balance. There are a lot of ways a battery maker can cut corners with the cells themselves that you'd never see, even if you took the packs apart like we did. You must have JavaScript enabled in your browser to utilize the functionality of this website. What are the real differences between both categories of products and the genuine articles? (Maybe Canon and US Customs have cracked down more on LP-E6 counterfeits?). Two of these LP-E8s are real, two are fake, can you tell which? How likely do you think it is that these third-party replacements selling for $6 each actually have almost 90% more capacity? The two FET devices at the bottom act as switches, to disconnect the battery from the external terminals in the event of a short circuit, over or under-voltage, or too-high current drain. 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.). It's not uncommon to see third-party batteries advertised with much greater capacity than the manufacturer's own products. 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. Counterfeit batteries are only half of the equation, though; the market is saturated with counterfeit chargers as well. 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. This third-party unit instead had two thin rectangular cells in their place, filling maybe half the volume inside the case. (4.35 volts per cell) I didn't want to push my luck, so stopped the test at that point, not wanting to risk an explosion in my electronics lab. At present, we take environmental production as our priority and devote ourselves to high performance battery development. A third-party battery claiming 1200 mAh might be barely believable, but 1,300 mAh probably isn't. Just tape a steel weight on top, to bring the weight up to where it should be! Something went wrong. The Kastar batteries shown in the Amazon screenshot below can't possibly deliver 2,100 mAh. This is called "thermal runaway", and a burning Li-ion battery can hit temperatures of 1,000-1,500F (600-800C) in seconds. 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. 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. JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. 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. We concentrated mainly on Canon LP-E8 and LP-E6 batteries, as these are apparently two of the most widely counterfeited products. 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. It's easy to understand Canon's concerns: Besides the obvious issue of lost revenue, companies need to protect their brand reputation, and shoddy batteries and chargers with the Canon name on them (albeit without their permission) would reflect poorly on the company as a whole. (We saw at least one Amazon customer review reporting that a third-party pack with only a few months of use on it went from showing full, to 70%, to 40%, and then died completely, after only 5 minutes of runtime.). Of the batteries we tested, the protection circuitry in one failed to disconnect the battery from the charger, even when the voltage for the pack as a whole reached 8.7 volts. 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. As we showed earlier with the example of the LP-E6s, it can be nearly impossible to tell a counterfeit from the real thing just by looking at them. The more dangerous case is overcharging, though, meaning continuing to charge the battery beyond its "full" condition. Kastar Battery (X2) & LCD Dual Charger for Olympus LI-42B LI-40B, Fujifilm NP-45, Nikon EN-EL10, Kodak KLIC-7006 K7006, Casio NP-80 CNP80, Pentax D-Li63, D-Li108, Ricoh DS-6365 Battery. And that's just initial capacity; low-quality cells can have short cycle lives, and counterfeit packs may communicate their current-capacity status incorrectly. Genuine Canon LP-E8s go for $47.49, while third-party versions are as cheap as ~$4 each, and eBay counterfeits ranged from ~$11-$20. Secondly, though, the plated lithium doesn't get deposited smoothly, so the "dendrites" that are often formed can lead to internal shorts and thermal runaway. 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. Sure enough, they tested out at only about 680 mAh, vs the 1120 mAh of the official products, never mind the 2100 mAh they were claiming. But there's of course nothing to prevent a wiley counterfeiter from selling their packs at just enough below the price of legitimate products from the likes of Amazon or B&H that you might think they're just a particularly good deal. Such as high-tech enterprise with "Technology Innovation Award" and state-level high-tech enterprise. (I mean, drastically.). Also note that we're working in a lab environment, with a stack of freshly-charged packs always at the ready in our "battery corner." As noted above, though, some buyers of third-party products on Amazon have reported very rapid loss of capacity, even with relatively light usage. Even with legitimate third-parties, though, we found that pack construction is often several (large) steps down from that of Canon, Nikon, and other mainstream companies. Discrete-component charging circuits are also more susceptible to to failure from things like cold solder joints or defective components. Lithium-ion batteries are simple in concept, but manufacturing them requires careful design and rigorous monitoring and control of the manufacturing process if you're to achieve good capacity and safe operation. AAA+++. There's also an integrated circuit inside that communicates with the camera and charger, to tell the battery's state of charge. 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. (This shows a Seiko-Epson S-8252, but it's typical of the basic circuitry inside most 2-cell camera batteries.) High temperatures make the chemical reactions go even faster, creating even higher temperatures, so things rapidly get worse. (To add insult to injury, this maker also showed a higher mAh rating on the case than Canon's own.). Camera batteries obviously aren't in the same category as counterfeit drugs or contaminated food products, but we've all seen photos of melted-down computers and cell phones and videos of burning batteries on the Internet. Here again, you have to figure that camera makers aren't just tossing in all those parts for the sake of spending money. 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. For our capacity and under-voltage tests, we used a West Mountain Radio CBA IV battery analyser. Photos there were either too low-quality, or possibly not even of the products being sold, to detect any difference. I will be back, - Product arrived on time and as described Excellent product. The shot above shows the innards of two LP-E8 batteries; a Canon unit on the left and counterfeit on the right. This is a sure giveaway that the seller isn't to be trusted. We very carefully sliced open the battery samples, so we could see what was inside and how they were constructed. This allowed so-called "Kelvin" or 4-point measurements, to give accurate voltage measurements, regardless of contact or lead resistance or current flow. There's also the potential that the fake products might be dangerous, though, as counterfeiters will have few compunctions about cutting corners on manufacturing control and safety measures if it would shave a few cents off production costs. There are no products matching the selection. Recommended seller! We didn't have the time or wherewithal to test counterfeit chargers, even to the limited extent we did the batteries, but when we cracked several open and compared them to genuine chargers, the differences were jaw-dropping. Another result of a battery maker cutting corners is high cell resistance. The bottom image shows these probes plugged into an LP-E6 pack.). To take a look, we went online and bought about 20 samples of batteries advertised as "Genuine Canon" on eBay, but that were being sold for prices too good to be true. As you might expect, eBay is the Wild West, when it came to counterfeit battery products. Products like theVencon UBA5 provide for charging as well as discharging, automated scripts, etc. Using discrete components as they did, it's almost unavoidable that tolerances wil be looser, and they'll thus be that much more prone to overcharging (or undercharging, if the designers were in fact concerned about avoiding dangerous conditions and so allowed a greater safety margin). Note the black rubber padding filling the case on either end of the cells, and between the two cells. 40 product recalls for lithium batteries in the last 12 years, no less than 15 categories of potential manufacturing problems for lithium batteries. 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. (The two Nikon batteries arrived the same way, with folded-flat packaging.). Besides protecting the cells, the circuitry here communicates with the camera, to tell it how much charge is left. (No joke; puncturing a Li-Ion battery will amost inevitably lead to an internal short, thermal runaway, and the resulting violent smoke and flames.). Are they really dangerous? 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. If you start out with a camera and battery that have been sitting in a hot car, and then try to record video or fire off hundreds of shots in quick succession, a battery with high internal resistance could edge over into the danger zone. This was a very painstaking process, because we knew that cutting into the cell bodies themselves would almost certainly result in smoke and flames. As noted earlier, some third-party batteries even claim almost 2x the capacity of the genuine articles, but there's essentially zero chance of that being the case. I was curious, so ordered a pair of them, to see how they actually performed. Google adds RAW photo editing to Android Snapseed app, Ricoh Theta S Review: Keep the moment alive with 360-degree spherical panoramic stills and video. If the price seems to be too good to be true, it probably is. 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. In general, the genuine samples showed better construction techniques, especially the Canon LP-E8s vs their knock-off competitors. It was pretty difficult; the one at lower right was clearly printed with slightly different-colored ink, but that wouldn't have been apparant on eBay. If you charge beyond that point, two things happen. Can you guess which is which? Counterfeit batteries and chargers are everywhere on eBay. We only looked at charger models for Canon LP-E6 and LP-E8 batteries, albeit several samples of each, but the counterfeits were without exception shoddily constructed, and drastically less sophisticated than the genuine units. The extra space in the case was taken up with foam padding. 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. I will be back. View cart for details. Capacity (in mAh) was all over the map, ranging from a low of a bit under 43% to 99%, with many in the range of 60% or so. One of these is a fake, can you tell which? They'd surely be happy to save the cost, cut their prices, or make more profit, but have decided that the complexity is worthwhile, in terms of preserving battery life and protecting the consumer. 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. So it's possible that some battery packs may have slightly more capacity when brand new than those from the camera makers themselves, but you can pretty well count on them dying a lot sooner as a result. The Canon LP-E8s had very obviously more robust internal connections, more layers of insulating tape and spacers, what appear to be fuses in the leads coming off of each cell, and a plastic separator. The counterfeit and third-party units all had wires connecting directly to contacts lodged in the case, requiring wires and connections to be cut, to free the battery and protection circuitry from the case. (And as noted, some batteries we tested had cutoff voltages well into the range that would result in permanent damage to the cells and shortened life.). 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. Counterfeit batteries are just a tiny blip in the overall counterfeiting landscape, but they're the one that probably affects us photographers most directly. Also visible here is the very robust construction of the OEM batteries, with fat solder joints and thick insulators over the ends of the cells. We also purchased a couple of fake Nikon EN-EL14s, just to have a sample of some other brand being targeted by counterfeiters. It was only the counterfeit and third-party units where we saw cutoff voltages noticeably higher than recommended levels. These shots show the circuit board from inside a Canon LP-E8 that contains the protective circuitry, the front view on top. The solution? 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. (A note for electronics geeks: The probes I used were thin pieces of stainless steel, with two layers for each terminal, separated by insulating tape. It's also virtually guaranteed that the cells inside aren't made with nearly the care or quality of materials found in mainstream products. What we found inside was again a mixed bag. Notably, all the brand-name batteries we tested (several Canon LP-E6 and LP-E8s, as well as a pair of Nikon EN-EL15s) were conservative in their over-voltage cutoff points, staying within accepted limits. {"modules":["unloadOptimization","bandwidthDetection"],"unloadOptimization":{"browsers":{"Firefox":true,"Chrome":true}},"bandwidthDetection":{"url":"https://ir.ebaystatic.com/cr/v/c1/thirtysevens.jpg","maxViews":4,"imgSize":37,"expiry":300000,"timeout":250}}. Testing under realistic load conditions showed them to have a capacity of only 686 mAh. Differences between counterfeit batteries and genuine ones were sometimes subtle to the eye, but with chargers, the counerfeits' shortcomings were blatantly obvious. The thing is, Canon and other camera makers are using top-quality cells from premium manufacturers, so it's unlikely that cells from other makers would have higher capacity. Again, the most obvious giveaway is the price; they sell for a lot less than genuine ones from the camera makers. The real corker came when we cracked open an LP-E6 replacement pack from the same maker. We have received numerous awards, patents and titles. 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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). Product arrived on time and as described Excellent product. That's only 61% of the capacity of an official Canon LP-E8, and just 33% of the claimed output. You wouldn't be able to detect this without test equipment (the output voltage drops more when it's placed under load), but high internal resistance means the battery can heat up a lot more than usual, especially when it's supplying more current. This photo shows the guts of a genuine Canon LP-E6.