From time to time, when I learn something really cool, I’ll put it on my blog — but I back date so the post shows up in search engines but not on the front page of the blog. So here is a cool thing I found: a generic, decoded, chipped LP-E6 for a quarter of the cost of the original!
I’ve been searching for a long time for an alternative to Canon’s LP-E6 lithum ion battery pack for the Canon 7d and EOS 5d Mark II. Until now, I could have bought the Canon-branded battery for a whopping $85 (if I could even find it in stock), or I could have scored a cheap knock-off on eBay. The problem with the majority of the generic batteries is twofold: first, they require their own charger (which takes up extra space in an already crowded camera bag), and second, they don’t have the chip in them that lets the camera know how much juice they have left.
If I were shooting landscapes or studio portraiture, that wouldn’t be a real big deal: the battery would die, my subjects likely wouldn’t move, I’d switch the battery, and life would go on. However, in my destination wedding photography business, operating blindly like this poses a huge issue. What if the battery dies a second before the first kiss? Disastrous! I need to be able to see how many bars of power are left on the battery; if it’s just one bar, I’ll swap batteries during a spare few seconds of shooting.
Enter the JiakGong Accessory Store on eBay. (Click that link to go the the eBay storefront). This seller offers a generic, decoded and chipped battery, shipped to your door, for $20. Nobody’d ever reviewed it before, so I took a risk and gave it a go. Awesome! It doesn’t last as long as my original LP-E6 battery, but it serves its purpose perfectly. It charges in the Canon charger and it lets me know how much power is left in the battery. My strategy is to just shoot with the original Canon battery until I have one bar left (usually 8 hours or more — the original battery is pretty rad) and then I switch to the generic LP-E6 battery for the remainder of the night. I’ve found that it lasts about 70 percent as long as the original battery, which, when paired with the Canon OEM battery, is way more than enough for a full day’s shoot. It took about a week to arrive.
Hope this helps everyone!