Quote Originally Posted by Tannin View Post
There are four kinds of appliance battery. (I.e., batteries for cameras, laptop computers, and so on.)

  • Manufacturer branded (in this case by Canon). These are not made by the appliance manufacturer, but bought in from a specialist battery maker under contract. A quality company (e.g., Canon, Lenovo, or pretty much any equipment maker this side of very cruddy Chinese ones) buys in good quality batteries and brands them with its own name. The bad news: they charge like wounded bulls for what, in the end, is simply a commodity battery.
  • No-name nasties. Avoid these at all costs They are way, way cheaper than the manufacturer batteries, but are quite likely to fail, damage your equipment, or (in the worst case) catch fire. Expect to pay anything from 20% to 80% of the manufacturer price.
  • Branded third-party batteries. These are rare, but do exist. For example, I recently bought a Duracell replacement battery for my Thinkpad. Every bit as good as the Lenovo-branded one, two-thirds of the price. I don't recall seeing any of this kind for camera batteries, but there may be some. Expect to pay around 70% of the manufacturer-brand price.
  • No-name quality. These are not uncommon but really hard to identify. The batteries Canon sell you come out of a factory and they are, branding and packaging aside, perfectly ordinary mass-produced batteries. You can buy the same batteries, or very similar, made to the same standards, often in the same factory, but without the Canon (or etc.) name. They are the best value of all - but it's really hard to know which these ones are and which the no-name nasty ones are. You can often pick these up for about 50% of the manufacturer-branded price.
Thanks for the info Tony. I'll prob just go with canon to be safe, once bitten