canon digicam batts

[Fritz]

woudja buy non-OEM from ebay or amzn, or do you think one should stick with OEM batts?
STK (1400 mAH) and Vivatar (1200 mAH) seem pretty popular at bezos place.
And they're made in China, so you know they're top notch

[MEG]

I have. They've worked (read: they didn't explode or fail within a week). None of them ever seemed to last as long in the camera as the OEM batteries (even though rated higher in terms of mAH) and they seemed to be needed to be replaces quicker than the OEM batteries. But given they cost 1/3rd the price that seemed like an appropriate tradeoff. Currently only have OEM batteries just cause I didn't feel like cycling through my stash of batteries that frequently - when I had four of them it always seemed like there was one that would only last 2 hours in the camera when fully charged and then I'd have to replace it, be good for another 2 months and then another battery would be the 2 hour battery, etc... YMMV...

[Buzz]

I usually buy three (or four) sets of 2 third party batteries, and one set of them always seems to significantly outperform the OEM and the others. I keep the four or five* (*if the OEM is second best) best batteries in the bag. If/when the batteries start to fade, I try to re-order the best ones, but often they do not turn out to be the same. I view digicam batteries as the luck of the draw, since the vendors swap 'em up so frequently. What I'm looking for (obviously) is the longest lasting battery type, and I've always found third party barreies w/ greater capacity than OEM. Sometimes I give away the extra batteries when I find someone using the same model camera, otherwise I just sell 'em w/ the old camera after we get a new model.
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[Lew Zealand]

MEG wrote:
I have. They've worked (read: they didn't explode or fail within a week). None of them ever seemed to last as long in the camera as the OEM batteries (even though rated higher in terms of mAH) and they seemed to be needed to be replaces quicker than the OEM batteries. But given they cost 1/3rd the price that seemed like an appropriate tradeoff. Currently only have OEM batteries just cause I didn't feel like cycling through my stash of batteries that frequently - when I had four of them it always seemed like there was one that would only last 2 hours in the camera when fully charged and then I'd have to replace it, be good for another 2 months and then another battery would be the 2 hour battery, etc... YMMV...

This has been my experience with 3rd party replacements for Olympus and Canon batteries.

[space-time]

I hate these proprietary batteries. There should be some standard, just like we have for Alkaline cells. I understand that making these cameras smaller and smaller, you cannot have only 2-3 shapes, maybe there need to be 5-6 standard, but at least batteries for small camera should be the same, regardless if it is a Canon, Nikon, Pentax, etc. This way you will still be able to buy a high quality battery, and they should be supported for a very long time. Right now, if you want to buy an OEM battery for a camera made in 2005? I don't think anyone still makes those.