Slashdot Mirror
Panasonic Begins To Lock Out 3d-Party Camera Batteries
OhMyBattery writes "The latest firmware updated for Panasonic digital cameras contains one single improvement: it locks out the ability to use 'non-genuine Panasonic' batteries. It does so for safety reasons, it says. It seems to indicate that this is going to be the norm for all new Panasonic digital cameras. From the release: 'Panasonic Digital Still Cameras now include a technology that can identify a genuine Panasonic battery. For the protection of our customers Panasonic developed this technology after it was discovered that some aftermarket 3rd party batteries do not meet the rigid safety standards Panasonic uses.' The firmware warning is quite clear as to what it does: 'After this firmware update your Panasonic Digital Camera cannot be operated by 3rd party batteries (non genuine Panasonic batteries).'"
Every major manufacturer of printer cartridges has counter-measures to prevent remanufactured inkjet and laser cartridges. These are designed to prevent "3rd party" cartridges.
Epson is probably the nastiest, An encrypted chip and a fuse that gets blown after a certain period is on their newer models.
Regardless, if there is money to be made, someone (especially in China. They seem to be very good on circumventing consumable copy protection), will make an acceptable aftermarket part which appears to be authentic.
yeah, but it's apparently legal for a battery maker to clone their battery "feature":
http://www.pcworld.com/article/121327/supreme_court_rebuffs_lexmark_in_toner_cartridge_fight.html
Quick google shows knockoffs at under $20, and the Panasonic unit at $50 for the DMW-BCF10
My debut novel AMITY now available: http://jeremydbrooks.c
I'm sure all future firmware will include this. And I'm sure all new cameras will include this without the ability to go back.
The "official" reason why you are not allowed to pump your own gas in Oregon
is that oregon pavement is wet and hazardous, and only trained grunt's can navigate
the treacherous pavement.
At least in the United States, a manufacturer is not legally allowed to void a warranty for the use of third-party products unless they can show that the third party product caused the damage involved in the warranty claim... not that it can cause damage, but that it did cause damage. So no, they cannot detect the battery and invalidate the warranty. Doing so would put them in violation of Magnuson-Moss.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Somebody needs to brush up on their history.
But probably in the legal opinion of more than one lawyer, at least in certain jurisdictions.
Ironically, IAAL.
Li-ion @ 20 degrees C will lose about 20% of its capacity per year without usage. that means in a few short years it will be time for you to buy a new camera whether you want one or not. I bet there are lots of perfectly good cameras thrown away because their proprietary lithium ion batteries lost their capacity and got discontinued.
Of course, one can always rebuild the original Panasonic battery pack. just buy a similar voltage and slightly smaller size lithium ion (3.6 or 7.2v usually) on ebay and you should be able to retrofit it inside the original battery pack.
I even recently saw a device advertised recently which converts some other type of card (microSD? not sure) to Memory Stick. Obviously such a thing wouldn't exist if Memory Stick were priced competitively.
I suppose the existence of other devices that convert Memory Stick to SD is also proof that Memory Stick is not priced competitively.
By definition, were it not priced competitively, it would not exist (for long anyway). Sony doesn't lock in all devices either, for example the PS3s that have memory slots accept a host of forms and you can swap out the harddrive in any PS3 if you like.
Is the "Panasonic camera battery" market considered a market, in terms of antitrust law? If so, are they setting themselves up for antitrust action?
in the same way that Apple-compatible computers is considered a market... (i.e. not at all)?
Panasonic has already been doing this with their HDC-HS100 HD camcorders, I tried a 3rd party battery, it would power up with an error message about the battery then shut down.
I use third party Li-ion camera batteries in my electronics projects to provide portable, rechargeable power solutions, and most of the cheap knock-offs will have the same pins; Positive, Negative and Thermistor. However, the Thermistor pin will just be hooking into an internal 10K resistor that doesn't change with temperature. The battery will still fit in the camera, but the temp sense pin is merely a dummy pin. From that perspective, I can see a safety concern... In this case though, I think Panasonic is just trying to tie their camera to their preferred battery suppliers.
My understanding is that the law was created to curb an issue of car manufacturers saying "Oh what's that, you used a third party air filter in your car and not the 3x as expensive Ford one? Sorry, your warranty is void" even though the problem was in your suspension. Electronics are obviously a lot more of a grey area for whether the accessory damaged the unit or not.
Yeah. There's even a citation for it in the Wikipedia page on M-M. It's section 2302, paragraph (c).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Apple doesn't make cameras.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
... with releasing their KX-6500 printer. First they released the printer along with cheap accesories (toner and drum module - sold separately). Two years later drum module price almost tripled and at this point its price became comparable with new printer price. Early users of this printer were basically screwed as drum had to be replaced after approx. two years of moderate use. Since then I don't touch Panasonic products, even with a ten foot pole.
It would be interesting to see what standards they refer to. Is that a trade secret?
Many cheap li-ion batteries do not include the protection circuits or safety features that keep li-ions from going flat or turning into bombs.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"What a coincidence! Today my wallet decided to lock out Panasonic products. Oh well. Canon is better anyway."
People ask those with experience what to buy and why. Some well-placed scorn such as "good luck buying batteries for that piece of shit" can put off potential customers.
If corps can stick it to us, we can stick it to them with equal or greater gusto. :)
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The Sansa e200 has a replaceable battery(and supports Rockbox, and microSD expansion, which is handy. And Woot.com has a tendency to sell refurbed units for peanuts from time to time). Not as elegant as Apple's entry; but perfectly competent. Excellent for exercise music purposes.
ob disc: I'm a long term pany cam shooter.
yes, they make cam. they beat canon (you've heard of them, perhaps?) in the superzoom cat every year for the last years since the fz5 came out (4 yrs ago, I think).
their fz30 and to some extent the fz50 are classics. nothing else has its feature set and can produce really fine quality shots (IFF you use noise reduction and follow some exposure/setting rules).
this is why the announcement by pany is so annoying. they had a good fan base that knew the product line and followed it (what else could a company want than really loyal supporters?). their in-lens OIS was really effective and it found its way into even pocket sized digicams. people looked forward to the next model, etc.
but now, there is a big boycott going on in the pany camps (read the online forums and you'll see). the discontinuation of the 'big fz' (fz50) was one huge blow; but the battery lock-in story is the final blow and enough to cause pany fans to leave the brand.
this WILL hurt them. I wonder if they can find a graceful 'sorry, we were just kidding' story to back-out of this mess?
all other brands: look and learn.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I'd think that Sega vs Accolade would essentially apply in this case. The supreme court has ruled that if somebody makes a product that requires the violation of a trademark or copyright in order to make it interoperate with another part, then they cannot enforce their IP rights against those who violate them purely to make devices interoperable.
Courts generally don't like legal loopholes - at least not the supreme court. Sure, you can tie up soembody in court with a clever legal theory that clearly violates the intent of a supreme court decision, but eventually they'll find against you. I suspect that since there have been a few rulings along these lines now that lower courts aren't going to look kindly on playing games with IP law to stick it to consumers.
They put the original battery they received with the camera back in and return it. Isn't that what he just said?
If the damage is caused by a faulty battery, you turn the device over to the battery manufacturer along with the failed battery. They pay for your replacement equipment.
Done it twice, first with a Panasonic cassette camcorder and then with a Kodak C743. Duracell paid both times for the damaged hardware.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
So, does this firmware protect against defective Panasonic brand batteries? You don't need to go further than a google for Panasonic battery recall to note that they ship defective batteries without short circuit and overheating protection with the best of them.
See, otherwise the 'consumer safety' angle sounds like a really lame excuse for exactly the monopolist positioning the GP suggests.
In the digital compact market Panasonic is holding its own fairly well. Although the newest models indeed have these nonsensical battery firmware updates, the FZ28 can go head to head easily with the canon SX10.. And if you don't upgrade firmware, the LX3 with the 1.1 FW is one of the best cameras in its segment. Similarly for the tz7.
Panasonic began doing this battery lockout awhile back, I remember seeing their camcorders reject third party batteries about a year or 2 back. Canon makes excellent cameras, doesn't attempt to shoot you in the leg with a battery lock-in, and their RAW format plays well with many software options (free and otherwise). If I was looking to buy a camera right now, you can bet it wouldn't be a Panasonic, regardless of how close it compares to a Canon.
Any battery with the same specifications should work..
At the risk of incipient tar-and-feathering, let me offer a contrasting point of view.
All batteries are not alike. The length of a proper battery specification for a consumer application is enormous (several hundred pages), and usually includes a requirement along the lines of, "No change shall be made to an approved product [i.e., the battery], whether or not such change affects performance to the specifications herein, without prior express written consent of the XYZ Corporation" -- in other words, once it's working in our application don't change anything, whether or not we've thought to control that parameter in the spec. The problem is, the consumer has no way of knowing that the battery he's buying actually meets the product's battery specification -- and there are plenty of motivational reasons for the knockoff battery supplier to cut corners. Even an ethical battery manufacturer has to work very closely with the consumer product design team to understand the details of the battery specification.
I spent 25 years designing portable products for consumer applications, and I stand before this frenzied mob to say that one of the largest problems one faces when engineering these products are non-standard batteries. The consumer buys a knockoff battery, and when the product sooner or later (a) catches fire, (b) has terrible battery life, or (c) exhibits some unusual behavior, I am here to tell you that the consumer will blame the product, rather than the battery, 100% of the time, driving warranty costs through the roof. This leads to incredible feats of over-engineering in the product itself, to account for as many types of battery variation as the engineering staff can think of, and that the development program cost and time goals allow. The ability to design for a specific type of battery -- and only that type of battery -- was a luxury often discussed among the engineers with which I worked, since we knew we were adding cost, size, and weight to our designs as "defensive engineering" against the knockoffs.
I can see that you remain unconvinced, so let me give you a few examples of battery specifications, and the problems caused when they are not met.
1. Internal resistance. Batteries do not all source the same amount of current when given the same load. Take a dozen manganese-dioxide AAA batteries from a dozen battery vendors around the world. Periodically place, say, a 10-ohm resistor across their terminals, and measure the voltage across the battery terminals over time. The difference between the open-circuit battery voltage and the voltage under load is controlled by the internal resistance of the battery. A fresh, good cell from a reputable manufacturer will have an internal resistance of approximately 1 to 1.5 ohms, so the voltage under load remains high, approaching the open-circuit voltage.
A cell from a less reputable manufacturer can have an internal resistance of several dozen ohms; when this cell is placed in a product that draws, say, 100 mA from its battery (for example, when sending an audible alert, or turning on a few LEDs), the battery voltage seen by the product can drop from the nominal 1.3 V to as low as 0.3 V, usually leading to a system reset. The consumer, of course, knows only that that crappy product from XYZ Corporation doesn't work (or stopped working sooner than expected, or does funny stuff when the volume knob is set too high); there's no way for him to know the internal resistance of the battery he bought.
Note that the internal resistance of all batteries increases as the battery is discharged, so a major part of power management in portable products is addressing this issue. Frequently, especially in products with high peak-to-average current drain ratios, battery internal resistance, rather than energy exhaustion itself, is the factor that determines battery life, so how fast internal resistance changes over the life of the bat
Why can't I turn it off?
I can decide to turn off my airbag.
I can't (legally). Not unless I get a written waver from NHTSA. Looking at the application [pdf], you can see that you can't turn it off on a whim. Maybe you live in a country that doesn't try to over protect, but the example is untrue in a large part of the world.
Every dcraw-based software can open correctly LX3 raws. This was to me the 2nd most important selling point of this camera, 1st being the fabulous optic. (I've never liked canon glasses, but I reckon that's just me).
Yes and the pro and semi-pro market is totally Pwned by Panasonic, SONY and JVC (aka Nihon Victor). It's a totally different picture in the 'sumer market, though.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?