Tue Jul 13, 2010 11:23 pm
There is a lot of FUD here.
off-brand Lipo batteries will not simply kill your camera. They are all (that I have ever heard of) safe enough to use in your equipment. There are drawbacks though.
-They often use binned cells. This often results in incorrect balancing, and a series battery is only as strong as it's weakest cell.
-They are often composed of older cells. If you use your camera a ton this matters less, but for those of us that go through very few charges (like me, I'm light on my flash) it matters more as we will get fewer years of use out of them.
-They sometimes mix and match cells. This affects balancing.
Despite these drawbacks, they all have the same protection circuitry, off-brand or not. None of them will enter a state that would set the battery on fire, or even get hot. If they do explode, it would be on the charger (just like your canon branded batteries). It is not like a computer power supply where it can run a bunch of high voltage current through your components; when these batteries fail it is a low voltage failure and your camera just turns off. Don't be afraid of killing your camera, even shorting them out would cause the battery circuitry to cut the power.