One more annoyance gone

[johnridley]

Canon chipped the batteries for their HD camcorders, one of which I own. The high capacity battery that I bought with it (2+ years ago) had to have its own charging method and a 4-LED bar graph to show how much capacity was left in it. And every time I turned the camera on, it waited about 10 seconds then popped up a "unable to communicate with battery; continue?" message. Engineered for maximum irritation.

After the concert weekend, I decided I really would like to have another large battery for it. Turns out that the clever Chinese (I assume) have reverse-engineered the chip, and you can now buy "decoded" batteries that charge normally and give precise to-the-minute readouts of remaining time.

And the price is still $18 shipped for a battery that Canon charges $120 for. So woo-hoo!

I really wish it were Sony, or some company I'm used to making fun of, doing stuff like chipping batteries. But it seems like it's EVERY company now. Just try to find a company that hasn't taken SOME steps to keep people from refilling their ink/toner, for instance.

I just get really irritated when they put so much effort into making the equipment that I buy from them work against me.

Comments

[madtechie2718.livejournal.com]

Bad enough with camcorders costing a few hundred dollars - I've started rewriting the terms and conditions of purchase for radiology equipment costing up to a couple of million dollars in an attempt to reduce this sort of nonsense...

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Wow, seriously? That's just being silly (on the company's part).

[erikvolson.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem is there can be good uses for a chip in a bolt-on, and then someone gets silly about lock in.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I don't think there is a good reason when it comes to camcorder batteries. Sony, 20 years ago had the ability to tell remaining battery runtime down to the minute with no chip at all. There's nothing that a chip inside the pack can tell that a chip in the camera can't tell; at worst they have to extend a lead out for each cell, and I think they do that to manage charging properly anyway.

Similarly, ink and toner. Brother (for toner) and Canon (for ink) both detect empty states by shining a light at the cartridge. Simple, cheap and foolproof (at least, I've never had a problem with them reading wrong).

I think in the case of consumer electronics, there's probably very little that they do with these chips that they couldn't do equally well and probably cheaper without the chips. Except for lock people into their consumables chain.