Nikon’s recently released Nikon Z8 (buy here) has proven quite popular. With lots of pre-orders getting into people’s hands now, though, a dirty secret has been revealed. Nikon is actively blocking 3rd party batteries from working with it. Reports were posted to Reddit and social media from users who’ve received their cameras and found that it doesn’t work with their 3rd party EN-EL15C batteries.
While this is something Nikon has been known to do in the past, this time, it caught the attention of Right to Repair campaigner Louis Rossman. While Louis typically slates companies trying to force customers into compliance, he takes a pretty fair and objective look at the situation. Ultimately, however, he believes it’s not in Nikon’s best interests to continue doing this.
[Related reading: Why batteries are something you want to buy OEM (even at exorbitant pricing)]
Blocking 3rd-party batteries isn’t something new for camera manufacturers, particularly Nikon. Quite a few customers have reported that their third-party batteries suddenly no longer work after updating firmware on their cameras over the years. This includes one user who found that his batteries suddenly stopped working on his D500 (buy here) and D7500 (buy here) bodies. There was also another user who noted the same on their D3300.
Louis’ take on the situation is actually pretty well-reasoned. He looks at why Nikon would implement this restriction – in the name of user safety – and then calls it out for what he believes it really is. And as far as he’s concerned, it’s a solution looking for a problem in the name of greed and profit. It’s to force people to pay way camera manufacturers more than they need to for OEM batteries instead of buying 3rd party batteries at half or a third of the cost.
The user safety issue he mentions is the battery overheating. After all, these are lithium-ion batteries, and we all know what can happen to those. They can very quickly run into an unstoppable force of exploding fire. We’ve seen massive recalls from Samsung, Dell and others in the past over battery fire risks. Not to mention Samsung phones actually exploding on people and in planes (twice).
[Related reading: Nikon recalls popular batteries over potential heating & melting issues]
There is a bit of a difference here, though. As Louis points out, there’s no epidemic of cameras exploding in users’ faces while shooting a photo. Smartphones and laptops are continually charged and discharged throughout the day. With camera batteries, the typical usage doesn’t put the batteries under the kind of stresses usually required to cause such an event to happen. Sure, it occasionally happens, as it did with this Blackmagic camera, but it is extremely rare.
Lithium-ion batteries from most camera (and smartphone) manufacturers contain temperature sensors to detect battery overheating. They use what’s known as a thermistor, which adjusts its resistance based on temperature, to determine how warm the battery is. Once it hits a certain limit, the camera shuts down. This is why, with some overheating cameras, simply swapping out for a fresh battery (albeit in a hacky way) will fix the issue.
These thermistors are sometimes (but usually not) replaced in 3rd party batteries by a simple standard resistor. This essentially provides the camera with a temperature reading that never changes, regardless of how warm or cool the battery is. Here’s a video that explains a little more how that works using smartphone batteries, which contain a similar technology.
It’s these unscrupulous third-party manufacturers that don’t accurately report the temperature which Nikon sees as the threat. They can’t regulate third-party batteries, so they force you to use their own OEM batteries. This would be fine if OEM batteries actually came with a reasonable price tag. Nikon isn’t alone here. OEM batteries from Sony, Canon, Panasonic and every other camera manufacturer are all ridiculously overpriced for what they are.
But, again, it’s a problem that doesn’t really exist. Even third-party batteries that do have simple resistors in them instead of thermistors aren’t randomly exploding in peoples faces. And as Louis points out, it’s entirely possible for camera manufacturers to add safeguards into the camera to overcome the problem of third-party batteries that misreport their temperature. And, well, it’s not like Nikon hasn’t had melting battery issues of their own in the past.
But as he also points out, this isn’t great business for Nikon (or any other camera manufacture). They’d be paying money to have their customers go to spend money elsewhere on batteries. Of course, as noted right at the beginning of the video, preventing the use of third-party batteries is going to prevent customers from buying their cameras in the first place. So, who really loses out?
Do you use third-party batteries with your camera? Have you ever had one explode on you?
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