One thing I liked about shooting Canon cameras, such as the 5DSR, is that it had a feature to allow for assessment of battery condition. I assume that it measured battery internal resistance and then used a reference table to correlate battery condition or remaining battery life.
I had a pile of batteries (as I do now for Sony) and the great thing about this feature is that when I wanted the greatest battery longevity for travel, etc, I could always identify my best batteries to take with me.
Sony, from what I can tell, does not offer this feature(?). Has anyone found an aftermarket battery condition measuring device that works with FZ100 batteries?
You can check a "star" rating after you charge them with the ISDT NP2. Not sure how accurate it is, but one of my batteries reports one less star and it's sort of my backup of a backup/last resort battery.
From the manual:
Battery Health Rating
During charging, the charger will rate the battery according to
the internal resistance of the battery, and the full score is five
stars in white. After the charging cycle is complete, the charger
will evaluate the health of the battery based on the electrical
resistance and the accumulated charge capacity. Five stars in
the top rating.
It is totally unclear to me if the Canon "Battery info" really does any internal analytics or if it is simply a progressive countdown based on the recorded usage of the battery. According to the user manual, the Nitecore he USN4 Pro does an "initial low
current test charge to diagnose the battery status" on the NP-FZ100. It shows a "good", "normal" or "poor" rating while charging.
It would be easy to make an accurate device. Almost all hobby chargers have a discharge function. My fairly inexpensive charger has a PC interface function too. So you just select a discharge current, about 0.5C, ie, half the rated capacity of the battery. FZ100 is 2280mAh so use 1 Amp. Select a cut off voltage, 3.4V would be my choice, meaning actual Volts no load would be 3.6 to 3.7 Volts. Start test and when complete charger will show total mA discharged and time. Using that conservative cut off volt setting, I'd expect around 1900mA for a good, new battery.
After testing a few new or near new batteries, you'd have a bench mark.
As I already have a hobby charger, I'd just get a cheap charger and junk the charger electronics and just use it as a way to connect hobby charger to the battery terminals.
That test method tests real capacity under load. It would simulate heavy use, ie, the kind of use that would fully deplete a battery in a little over 2 hours. You could use 0.5A discharge instead to simulate usage scenario that would fully deplete battery in around 4.5 hours.
Assuming the charger device hacked for coonnection has 3 terminals for cells, you could also use hobby charger to 'balance charge' the battery. What this does is show you live, during charging, each cell's state. Balance charging indicates if one cell is being charged at a lower rate which is neccessary to keep cells balanced. At completion of charging, if one cell is in worse condition than the other, the total mAh charged will be lower and you'll know it's because one cell is bad.
Choderboy wrote:
Assuming the charger device hacked for coonnection has 3 terminals for cells, you could also use hobby charger to 'balance charge' the battery. What this does is show you live, during charging, each cell's state. Balance charging indicates if one cell is being charged at a lower rate which is neccessary to keep cells balanced. At completion of charging, if one cell is in worse condition than the other, the total mAh charged will be lower and you'll know it's because one cell is bad.
I expect that you probably calculate rocket trajectories in your spare time. I was looking for something a little simpler.
InFocus2014 wrote:
I expect that you probably calculate rocket trajectories in your spare time. I was looking for something a little simpler.
I do have a technical background, but I'm no genius.
Most people involved in any type of Radio Control either learn about this or learn enough of the details to allow them to manage their batteries.
FWIW, the latest version of ISDT NP2, called ISDT NP2 Air, requires an app to see the battery and charging information. Part of the information displayed is the battery's resistance in mohm, which as noted above could be a proxy for battery health. I don't have any data to support the accuracy of this measurement, but I can say that I charged two batteries to 100% in the charger and the one with higher resistance only showed 97% when put in camera.
