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).'"

Comments

Re:I am in the market for a new camera.

[wherrera]

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

Re:No inherent problem

[skuzzlebutt]

Quick google shows knockoffs at under $20, and the Panasonic unit at $50 for the DMW-BCF10

Re:Grrrr.

[dgatwood]

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.

Re:Grrrr.

[dgatwood]

Yeah. There's even a citation for it in the Wikipedia page on M-M. It's section 2302, paragraph (c).

(c) Prohibition on conditions for written or implied warranty; waiver by Commission

No warrantor of a consumer product may condition his written or implied warranty of such product on the consumer's using, in connection with such product, any article or service (other than article or service provided without charge under the terms of the warranty) which is identified by brand, trade, or corporate name; except that the prohibition of this subsection may be waived by the Commission if--

(1) the warrantor satisfies the Commission that the warranted product will function properly only if the article or service so identified is used in connection with the warranted product, and

(2) the Commission finds that such a waiver is in the public interest.

The Commission shall identify in the Federal Register, and permit public comment on, all applications for waiver of the prohibition of this subsection, and shall publish in the Federal Register its disposition of any such application, including the reasons therefor.

Re:Standards?

[TubeSteak]

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.

Re:Nice.

[Khyber]

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.

Re:Panasonic is not worse than canon

[Bobfrankly1]

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.

Therein lies the problem

[dtmos]

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