Third party battery for the GH2

Having a spare battery is convenient. Without it, you cannot photograph anymore without going home and recharging the battery, should you run out of power.

Original spare batteries from Panasonic tend to be somewhat expensive. For the GH2, spare batteries have even been hard to find in certain markets.

One option is to buy a third party spare battery. They can be bought inexpensively from various auction sites. I decided to try one. It cost around US$20 including shipment from China.

The battery arrived very swiftly. It was packed well in a padded envelope, but beyond some bubble wrap, it did not come with any box for storing. Here is the original battery (on the left), and the third party battery (on the right):

The original battery comes with the official name, DMW-BLC12E.

On the reverse side, the third party battery, to the right, somewhat cryptically says: "For Pan.DMW-BLC12".

In use

The third party battery charges just like the original one. When inserted in the camera, though, there is one major difference which is easily spotted: You have no battery bars in the display anymore (using the third party battery on the right):

If you're going to use the battery for emergencies only, then this is no problem. But for normal use, it is a nuisance not to know how much power is left in the battery.

There is another consequence to this as well. When using the normal battery, the camera knows when the battery is almost depleted, and will not allow the user to take any more pictures. If recording a video, the camera will stop the recording, to allow for safely saving the footage already recorded.

The third party battery, however, does not allow the camera to see how much power is left. Hence, the power might go out during video recording, which could damage the whole recorded file, so that all your most recently filmed footage is lost. The same goes for images taken when the camera is almost out of power.

When the camera notes that there is not enough battery left, it leaves a message saying that the battery power is out, please recharge. With the third party battery, however, the camera simply uses up all the power until it is completely out, leaving the camera completely dead when having used up all the power. This is not a real problem, but can be confusing for some users.

Another side effect of using the non-original battery is that the camera loses the power save mode. So you must make sure to turn off the camera when not using it, otherwise the battery power will be drained too soon.

How much juice in the batteries?

I tried to compare how much video footage I could record with the two batteries. My camera is the European version, and can only record 30 minutes in one go. With the original batteries, I could start the video recording five times, with the last video being cut off after 24 minutes, due to too low battery. So the total recording time was 144 minutes, with the LCD display on all the time.

With the third party battery, I could only start three recordings. After that, the camera was completely dead, and did not respond until I replaced the battery with one that had some charge. The total recording time was 90 minutes.

This difference could be due to the new, third party battery not being worn in properly yet. Some say that batteries need to be used and recharged some times before reaching their optimal performance. I don't know.

Conclusion

The third party battery is good for emergency use. If your main battery goes empty, it would be good to have it in the camera bag to be able to continue using the camera until you can recharge the main battery.

But for critical use, it is not good. The battery could go empty while you are photographing or recording video, so that your most recent work is lost.