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Panasonic Begins To Lock Out 3d-Party Camera Batteries

Posted by timothy on from the humbly-meeting-customer-demands dept.

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).'"

2 of 450 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I am in the market for a new camera. by wherrera · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. Therein lies the problem by dtmos · · Score: 5, Informative

    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