Nex Spare Batteries

[Birma]

Does anybody have any recommendations on spare batteries for the Nex (same as A33/55?)?

I really don't want to shell out £76 at the Sony Centre. There are lots of third party ones but I have heard bad things about them in the past (in general) - are some more reliable than others? Amazon.co.uk has a supposed Sony version for £39 but seems too good to be true.

[Greg Beetham]

I’d be inclined to buy the genuine article if possible Birma, you can source them from say, B&H http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?Nt ... Search=yes (with user reviews) or Adorama http://www.adorama.com/searchsite/defau ... 4294960244 at a very good price, but thing is, you need to get a list together of odds and ends you need (memory cards, another flash for example) as well as the spare batteries, it’s not cost effective freight wise to just ship a spare battery.
Greg

Ps. Btw are you confessing to buying a NEX, if so which one?

[pakodominguez]

I was cleaning my equipment yesterday, testing lenses, filters, cameras... something I do every couple of months. And every couple of moths I trough away another third party NP400, bought at Adorama or on ebay, while the original Konika Minolta are still OK. Same happened with a third party battery I bought for the A700/A850, it cost less than half the price of the original Sony, but it barely last 18 months...

So, do your maths and decide witch one works better for you.

[Birma]

Thanks guys - I will certainly keep my eye out for deals on Sony originals.

Ps. Btw are you confessing to buying a NEX, if so which one?

Yep . I have joined the Nex gang with a shiney new silver Nex 5, it is Day 2. So far I have the e-mount 18-55, but I also have the Sony a-mount adapter and a cheapo Nex to MD adapter for a few older Minolta MD/MC lenses I have. It was the small form factor, with all of the regular dslr features (bar a VF), that convinced me. So far I am very impressed. Live view with a tilt-able screen is great, and the manual focus aids are brilliant. I am still in the new gear honey-moon period but I haven't picked up the A700 for two days. It will be interesting what makes me go back to it first - probably no charged battery for the Nex .

[Dr. Harout]

Thanks guys - I will certainly keep my eye out for deals on Sony originals.

Ps. Btw are you confessing to buying a NEX, if so which one?

Yep . I have joined the Nex gang with a shiney new silver Nex 5, it is Day 2. So far I have the e-mount 18-55, but I also have the Sony a-mount adapter and a cheapo Nex to MD adapter for a few older Minolta MD/MC lenses I have. It was the small form factor, with all of the regular dslr features (bar a VF), that convinced me. So far I am very impressed. Live view with a tilt-able screen is great, and the manual focus aids are brilliant. I am still in the new gear honey-moon period but I haven't picked up the A700 for two days. It will be interesting what makes me go back to it first - probably no charged battery for the Nex .

Hah, congratulations buddy.
BTW, ask Aram for a way to use batteries. Upon receiving his a55 (which shares the same battery) the battery was not included somehow. So he "engineered" a new one with a very long capacitance. I just gave him a call

[Birma]

Thanks Doc .

Wow - engineering your own battery is impressive stuff

[alphaomega]

Same happened with a third party battery I bought for the A700/A850, it cost less than half the price of the original Sony, but it barely last 18 months...

So, do your maths and decide witch one works better for you.

Just make absolutely sure that you do buy a genuine Sony battery. That means going to a local trusted supplier. I have three NP-FS500H "clones" on my top shelf here. I could not in any way ascertain they were not genuine from looking at the packaging or the batteries. Only when they were inserted did I discover they did not work. If they are too cheap to be true then they are fakes. I have seen "Sony" batteries advertised at say 2/3 of the Sony Style price. I would not touch them now. You can get good spares at less than 10 pounds. If they are just for back-up should the genuine ware become exhausted during a session a couple of third party ones will do.

[aramkostanyan]

Hi, as Doc said I did make come kind of a battery that works very fine.

Personally I use third party ones from ebay,
http://cgi.ebay.com/Battery-Sony-NP-FW5 ... 588a8eee20
These ones hold about 1.5 times less power, but they cost 8-9 times less.
This was without making anything.

So it happened to me that I has only one 3rd party battery, but need to use it for a whole day, about 700-800 pics.
I made some kind of an external battery that uses any kind of source that has 7.2-8.4 voltage.
I deconstructed the FW50 and took two wires out from it. When you deconstruct the battery you will see a circuit board and 2 cells of li-ion battery. You need to take out only 2 wires, connection, out of the three that you'll find there, third one, that is taken from the middle of two li-ion batteries, which has 3.7 volts comparing to the ground, it is just for circuit board to work.
Those two that you took out, should have 7.2-8.4 volts on them, you can connect them to any kind of source that has the same voltage, for example any other video camera battery, that is much bigger and has higher capacity, or other li-ion battery of 7.2 volts. For example i bought from ebay 18650 li-ion batteries (4 pack)
http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_from=R40&_ ... _nkw=18650
4 of them costed me $10, I connected two of them in series to get 8.4 volts, so I had two packs of batteries, each one of them holds about 4-5 times more than FW50.

This was the way I used them.
If you have any questions I'll be happy to answer, and provide some pics.
The only drawback of this design is that there is a wire going out of the camera.

[bossel]

... I haven't picked up the A700 for two days. ...

It'll be longer periods soon and when you pick it up again you'll say, gosh, what an ugly fat sucker...but you'll love the speed, my main concern with A700 vs NEX. Also choice of native lenses is still limited.

[Birma]

Hi Aram,

Thanks for the battery recommendaton and the detailed description of the modifications you made. I think I will get one of the eBay ones to try out, but I will leave the mod to those better with a soldering iron than me .


Hi Thomas,

I'm looking forward to the 23 August and the new camera and lens annoucements. I am thinking the SEL 55-210 sounds a good range. I will have to judge the cost versus the SAM 55-200 though, I'm quite pleased with focus speed on the Sony a mount adapter and so that is a possible alternative.

[aramkostanyan]

Just be sure not to solder whole circuit board )))

Let me know about your success was Birma.

[Birma]

Personally I use third party ones from ebay,
http://cgi.ebay.com/Battery-Sony-NP-FW5 ... 588a8eee20
These ones hold about 1.5 times less power, but they cost 8-9 times less.

Hi Aram, I ordered from this eBay seller and the battery arrived from Honk Kong today (6 days). It cost me just under 8 USD, about 5.50 GBP. Charged up fine and is currently working in the camera fine (showing % remaining). It is very, very close to the orginal in terms of size (no fitment problems in the charger or camera), and weighs slightly less (which goes some way to explaining why it holds less charge). A very useful back-up. After I have tested it further, at this price, I think I will get a couple more . Thank you for the recommendation!

[aramkostanyan]

You are welcome Birma. In my opinion they are very good backups in quality/price.
I think the same about the weight.
And if you disassemble it you'll see that the circuit board inside is much less complicated than original one. I think it's because it does not have the same capabilities in terms of safety and so on.
What about the external supply managements?

[Birma]

What about the external supply managements?

I don't think I'm going to try any disassembly and rigging anything up for external supply - I'll just stick with a few of these as spare batteries.

As you said, it does last for a shorter time than the original Sony battery, but dificult to complain at the price .

[aramkostanyan]

I usually like to disassemble things and see whats inside. )
I usually try to use only those Chinese batteries and keep the original ones as backups.
I think, let cheap ones die first.