Reliance on Li Ion batteries in Oly Pen series

Marty4650 wrote:

Big Ga wrote:

Marty4650 wrote:

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

As long as there is enough demand.

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.

Hmmm... Do you think that it might, possibly, ever so slightly, have a teeny weeny something to do with that battery also being used on about a zillion other Canon cameras? Wasn't that type also in the 20D, 30D, 40D etc ??

And the fact that Canon sells god knows how many more cameras than a company like Olympus!

And the BLM1 batter that the OP was fretting about was also used in multiple cameras too. Namely:

Olympus C-5060 Wide
Olympus C-7070 Wide Zoom, C-7070WZ
Olympus CAMEDIA C-5060 Wide Zoom, C-5060WZ
Olympus CAMEDIA C-8080 Wide Zoom, C-8080WZ
Olympus E-1 Digital SLR, E1
Olympus E-3 Digital SLR, E3
Olympus E-30 Digital SLR, E30
Olympus Evolt E-300 SLR, E300
Olympus Evolt E-330 SLR, E330
Olympus Evolt E-500 SLR, E500
Olympus Evolt E-510 SLR, E510
Olympus Evolt E-520 SLR, E520

He also mentioned he was concerned about the availability of BLS1 batteries, that are used in:

Olympus Evolt E-400 SLR, E400
Olympus Evolt E-410 SLR, E410
Olympus Evolt E-420 SLR, E420
Olympus Evolt E-450 SLR, E450
Olympus Evolt E-600 SLR, E600
Olympus Evolt E-620 SLR, E620
Olympus E-P1, EP1
Olympus E-P2, EP2
Olympus E-P3, EP3
Olympus E-PL1, EPL1
Olympus E-PL3, EPL3
Olympus E-PM1, EPM1

Those two batteries alone power a large part of the past ten years of Olympus' digital camera production. Do you really think no one will be making them? A simple google search will show you a few hundred different vendors selling a dozen or so different third party brands of these two battery sizes.

I'm still not worried. And you shouldn't be either.

Next, we can all worry about what we will do with our cars "when they stop making gasoline." This probably will happen someday, but probably not in our lifetimes. But we can still post a few threads worrying about it.

Well like I said, I'd be fine with the third party batteries as long as they were of the same build quality as the OEM's.  I dont want them swelling up and getting stuck in the camera after a year of usage.