Best AA size Battery Required

unrich

If you want more data than you can shake a stick at look HERE from another forum. (also this )

If you look around that forum you will find lots more information about discharge rates for NiMh and charger differences (mostly those available in the US).

As far as I can tell there are three reasons for Enloops and similar batteries.

1. Good for remote controls and other low current devices where the discharge rate for standard NiMhs is an inconvenience. You don't want to recharge the remote every other week.

2. Good for people who don't remember to charge their batteries before they need them.

3(the main one). They hold a decent charge when you buy them. People often want to use rechargeables but off the shelf they are useless. Hybrios mean you can buy rechargeables off the shelf, instead of Alkalines. Don't spend £3 or £4 for a throw away set of Alks when you can buy Hybrios/Enloops etc for twice the price and use them again and again ....

Apart from the above the disadvantages are higher cost and lower capacity than normal NiMH.

If I ran a shop, I would buy a few 15 minute chargers and offer a battery charging service, 25p a battery.

meester

djohn2002uk wrote: »

I have to agree with espresso here. I just don't understand why anyone would want to spend substantially more money on a battery that has less capacity and its only advantage appears when you leave it lying on the shelf.

Well you've obviously missed the point then.

Unless you discharge your batteries inside a couple of days, shelf life matters for virtually ALL applications. If you charge your batteries, put them in your camera, then two months later, you will have lost HALF your charge.

So they are quite clearly inferior.

Standard Nimh batteries are completely useless for long-life applications such as torches and remote controls, because you will turn on the torch in 1 year's time and the standard batteries will be totally without charge, but the eneloop/similar battery will still retain half of its original charge.

There are very few practical real-world battery using situations where you will get more charge from a 2800mAh nimh battery than a 2000mAh eneloop.

And the batteries do not cost substantially more at all.

You can get them here:

http://www.component-shop.co.uk/html/instant.html

for £1/battery for 2100mah - barely more expensive than standard rechargeables

The idea, btw, that you will only charge batteries when you need them is bizarre, then you have to wait hours while the batteries recharge, or else have a spare set and psychic powers to know when the ones you have are about to give out.

unrich

0.7% per day. From link here.

Do your own maths and see if you want eneloops/hybrios/instants or standard nimh.

roddydogs

Just to add that My Olympus will not work with batteries with less than 1.43 volts showing on a mulimeter.Ill let u know how the eneloops perform.!
I thing i would have been better off just buying bulk packs of Duracell than messing about buying chargers, and the cost of recharging

buglawton

Duracell will give you about 10 pictures if your Olympus behaves like my Casio

djohn2002uk

meester wrote: »

Well you've obviously missed the point then.

Unless you discharge your batteries inside a couple of days, shelf life matters for virtually ALL applications. If you charge your batteries, put them in your camera, then two months later, you will have lost HALF your charge.

So they are quite clearly inferior.

Standard Nimh batteries are completely useless for long-life applications such as torches and remote controls, because you will turn on the torch in 1 year's time and the standard batteries will be totally without charge, but the eneloop/similar battery will still retain half of its original charge.

There are very few practical real-world battery using situations where you will get more charge from a 2800mAh nimh battery than a 2000mAh eneloop.

And the batteries do not cost substantially more at all.

You can get them here:

http://www.component-shop.co.uk/html/instant.html

for £1/battery for 2100mah - barely more expensive than standard rechargeables

The idea, btw, that you will only charge batteries when you need them is bizarre, then you have to wait hours while the batteries recharge, or else have a spare set and psychic powers to know when the ones you have are about to give out.

First of all "a couple of days is nonsense, you obviously haven't read the links above.
Secondly, why would anyone buy a decent camera and leave it lying idle for a couple of months at a time?
And to roddydogs, measuring batteries "off load" means absolutely nothing. To see the true voltage you need to measure them under load, usually impossible whilst in a camera so you need to attach a suitable resister across the terminals to imitate the load required and measure the voltage at the same time. I can assure you that if those batteries are not working in your camera you will get a vastly different reading under load.

So, with "normal" NiMHs now up to 3200mAH (50% more capacity), and cheaper in the first place you could end up paying dearly for your choice.

unrich

Three things make for a happy life with a digital camera that uses AA batteries.

Good batteries.
A good charger.
A good camera that uses a decent charge from the batteries.

I get great results from Profitexx/Vapex batteries, Ansmann charger and Samsung S850 camera. I also pack a couple of "Instant" power AAs from Vapex.

Sounds like there's a list of rubbish batteries/chargers and cameras to be made.

Or perhaps there's a human factor as yet unexplored?

buglawton

We have 2 cameras, the small one that stays in a cupboard most of the time does take AAs. It would be quite nice to know it will definitely work whenever it is plucked form the cupboard. Anyways, these new Eneloop type of batts are something worth trying if you have already had some unsatisfactory experience with ordinary Nimh ones, especially if they are down to £1 each now (don't some alkalines cost that?).

roddydogs

I should also point out that i had a Praktika camera which i gave away, it had a lousy dim screen, but the batteries of any kind lasted ages

meester

djohn2002uk wrote: »

First of all "a couple of days is nonsense, you obviously haven't read the links above.

Well if you are leaving in there more than a couple of days, say one week, you've already lost about 200mah, which is quite a lot really.

Secondly, why would anyone buy a decent camera and leave it lying idle for a couple of months at a time?

Missing the point, once again.

Of course it's not idle for a couple of months at a time. A digital camera can do up to about 500 shots off one set of batteries. Very, very, few people will take 500 shots inside two months, you might go out at the weekend, take 10 or so pictures, and then again the next week, then 100 on holiday, and the batteries are nowhere close to dead, except they are, because you bought old-fashioned nimh batteries.

And secondly, very few 'decent' cameras take AAs anyway, they all use rechargeable lithium ions anyway, which don't suffer from the same discharge effect. So we are, in fact, more than likely talking about the sort of camera that might be left in a drawer for acouple of months, not a high-end DSLR.

So, with "normal" NiMHs now up to 3200mAH (50% more capacity), and cheaper in the first place you could end up paying dearly for your choice.

Just to let you know, those are fakes.

Sorry.

There are no genuine AA NimH batteries above 2700mah.

You've been conned.

And to make it worse, even genuine 2700mah batteries have worse self-discharge rates than lower capacity regular nimh batteries.