OMD: 3rd party battery users

I can't prove it was caused by the DSTE batteries, but I just had a scary experience that makes me suspicious.

I was shooting an event with the E-M 5, which I've used before for this type of occasion and which has worked fine. The only difference this time was that my Olympus battery was still charging, so I took my three fully-charged DSTE batteries and started out with one in the camera, along with a freshly-formatted memory card.

I got through about 200 shots (raw + JPEG) and everything seemed fine: battery indicator still showed 2/3 charge, camera functioned normally, photos looked good when reviewed in the finder immediately after shooting.

But when I got home, I discovered that Lightroom wasn't seeing the last half-hour's worth of photos on the memory card! They didn't show up in a Finder listing either; they seemed to be completely gone. That meant I had lost all my photos of the event chairmen, the head table, and all the podium speakers.

My best guess is that just before I shot the vanished photos, the battery's charge had momentarily dropped low enough to cause a write error, corrupting the card and causing all subsequent files to be lost.

Fortunately, CardRaider was able to recover the missing files; it took a long time to scan and the retrieved files were arranged fairly haphazardly, but at least I had my must-have photos back.

I'm not going to tell anybody else what to do, but based on my previous experience of the DSTE batteries not triggering the low-battery warning, instead just letting the camera shut down abruptly, and now this, I'm going to be retiring those little buggers just as soon as I can get a couple of spare genuine Olympus batteries. Yeah, I know, they cost a lot more, but this was a paid gig, and I'd have been out several hundred dollars if I had had to tell the organizers, "Sorry, I didn't get the shots."