I'm interested to hear from Canon users who might have experienced a problem with a Canon 50D which has a battery malfunction. The one in question is probably the last batch before the 60D and it doesn't get much use. A colleague and I were looking at some work she had done with the 50D a couple of months ago and I thought it was odd that the low battery warning was on. Canon batteries are generally pretty good, even if you charge them and don't use the camera for a couple of months, they still have good charge usually.

I decided to charge the thing and to my total surprise the re-charge only took about 15 minutes (normally 50 to 90 minutes), when I plugged the charged battery back into the camera, absolutely nothing, totally dead

So I thought that battery might be faulty, charged another one and again 15 minutes showed fully charged, inserted that and same thing, camera shows no response. I figured there might be a dirty contact somewhere, this was the only way I could see past this apparent death. A cleaning cloth inserted down the battery compartment and a rough guess as to where the terminals might be and a good old polish on the battery resolved the problem to my delight but this had me worried for a while

Keen to get any offering as to why the cleaning cloth trick worked (other than the obvious in that it did work) because I've been using Canon for years and I've never encountered this dirty terminal problem before??
Richard