Battery life EM-5 and Panasonic lens

There is a thread that pops up every couple of months, that says there are problems in using third party BLN batteries and/or chargers.

Basically, you want to only use the Olympus charger to charge Olympus batteries.

And vice versa, you want to use the third party charger that came with your third party batteries.

If you cross chargers, and use the Olympus charger on third party batteries or the third party battery charger to charge Olympus batteries, the batteries will not get topped off correctly. The underlying reason is the Olympus battery uses a slightly different chemistry than the generic batteries, and there are different cutoffs for properly charging the battery.

People on these previous thread who have tested the third party batteries (including tearing them apart to look at how they were assembled) typically say that the third party batteries don't really have the same capacity as the real BLN-1s (but on the other hand, if the battery has 2/3 the capacity of the Olympus battery, but is 1/3 the cost, you can make up for it by just carrying more batteries.

Since I started seeing these threads, if I use the correct charger, the batteries do seem to last longer. The Olympus battery does seem to last a little longer, but I'm not sure I can quantify how much.

In addition, I've been a big fan of wasabi batteries for my DSLR (BLM-1/BLM-5 clones) and Pens (BLS-1/BLS-5 clones). When I got my E-M5 2 years ago, I bought a pair of Wasabi BLN-1 clones in addition to the Olympus battery. I had to dispose of one of the Wasabi's last year due to the battery swelling. I just noticed that the second battery is swelling too, and I'll need to dispose of it.

So far, the pair of DTSE batteries that I picked up later haven't shown any swelling. But since I bought them much later than the Wasabis, it may be they too will swell.

Here are some threads:

• Measure time E-M1 can be powered by a battery (by Airmel)
• Post about BLN-1s and chargers (by Airmel)
• Post #2 about BLN-1s and chargers (by Airmel)