Reliance on Li Ion batteries in Oly Pen series

Marty4650 wrote:

When a battery is discontinued by the OEM, then there is more incentive for third party battery makers to sell them.

And once you realize that they are already selling them, you understand they would be crazy to stop selling them. They have already spent all they ever need to spend for R&D, tools and dies. Every battery sold from here on out is pure profit. In fact, at this point they can raise their prices since they have no competition from the OEM.

Right now, you can still buy third party batteries for digital cameras much older than those Olympus models. I did an internet search and found third party batteries still being sold for the Canon Powershot G1.... a model released 15 years ago in 2000.

I would be more worried about finding obsolete memory cards than finding batteries for older models. Try finding a SmartMedia or XD Picture card today! Used ones sometimes command high prices on ebay. Someday it might be hard to find a compact flash card.

Funny thing about CompactFlash, I picked up two 16 GB SanDisk Ultra CF last year from B&H and found they actually work in my old cameras (even though the higher capacity cards use a different file system and the camera is said not to support anything over 4 GB). On the LCD it says I can take almost 10,000 pictures on those cards, at full resolution and least compression!

I'd be fine with the third party batteries, as long as they weren't built cheaply and didn't have a track record of swelling up and getting stuck in the camera.