Thursday, June 4, 2009

Z1485 IS Camera Battery

I bought a non Kodak rechargeable lithium battery and charger off the internet for about 1/2 the cost of the genuine Kodak article. The battery fits the camera, it's a clone of Kodak battery type KLIC8000. I was too cheap to buy a pair batteries to allow one in the camera and one recharging. The Chinese maker did not bother to place his name on either the battery or charger, so I can't recommend a maker to you.
Battery life is good, I haven't been able to discharge the battery so far as to cause the camera to stop working. So it's good for 20-30 shots for sure and probably a good deal more. Not wanting to run out of battery while out taking pictures, I pop the battery into the charger when I come home from picture taking.
The charger will allow you to put the battery in backwards. It doesn't harm anything, but the battery won't charge when backwards. The charger has a single LED that lights red when charging, yellow when partly charged and green when fully charged or the battery is in backwards. The camera has enough backup capacitor to hold the time and date settings long enough to swap the battery. To avoid having to reset time and date, I slip the original non rechargeable battery into the camera while the KLIC8000 battery is in the charger. The non rechargeable battery has discharged so much it won't work the camera, but apparently it has enough charge to hold the memory settings.
The NON rechargable battery has different contact arrangements from the rechargable battery. This feature insures that the charger won't try to charge NON rechargeable batteries. The users manual warns of dire concequences from charging NON rechargeable batteries. I don't know how true this is, but I wasn't planning on verifying the warning. Many years ago a buddy was recharging plain old fashioned flashlight batteries. Most of the time the batteries would accept a charge, but once a battery exploded in the charger. Made quite an impression on us, and the buddy acquired the nickname "Supergoose" from that incident.

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