Used Canon batteries from MPB?

R2D2 wrote:

nnowak wrote:

StrugglingforLight wrote:

I noticed mpb has a few used Canon LP-E12 Batteries for $23 and under. Some are listed in "like new" condition. Is that regarding the cosmetic condition or the capacity remaining? Do they even test that? Also what does the 6 month warranty cover for a battery?

Has anyone purchased a battery from them, how was it?

I would never pay good money for unknown quality used batteries.

Some people obviously would. In fact the batteries that come with used cameras would all be classified thus.

Most people that buy used cameras view the included batteries as "freebies". While they are a nice inclusions with the purchase of a camera, the used batteries are certainly not the driving factor of the purchase. People's quality expectations for a battery included with a camera are far lower than when explicitly purchasing just a battery.

Especially when you can get 2 new third party parties for less than the price of a single used battery.

3rd party can be a crapshoot too, obviously.

OEM has always been my preference, but I have a lot of 3rd party to use as backups.

It is just too difficult to know what kind of treatment that battery has had.

Or in the case of 3rd party, what the manufacturing practices were, how/where the lithium was sourced, and what the capacity and lifespan will be. Most folks can only buy based on brand recognition, reviews, and good/bad reports.

Most of those are also unknown for OEM batteries.

For example, you could have a battery that was only used in the camera once, but spent a year sitting on the charger constantly getting topped up to 100%. The battery would look like new with barely a mark on the contacts, but performance would be dramatically degraded.

This is entirely false, and does not apply to these lithium ion chargers at all (like it would to older technologies such as NiCad and even NiMH). Simple Li-ion battery chargers for safety’s sake do not have a float or “trickle” charging function. They shut off charging current entirely when peak voltage is reached. If this is not done, then lithium batteries will over-charge, burst, and/or ignite. Bad bad bad.

Reread what I wrote. Nowhere did I suggest that lithium batteries would be trickled charged.

Instead, after the Li-ion battery has self-discharged over the course of several months down to the trigger voltage of the Canon charger, it’ll kick on again for a short while to bring the battery to full charge, and then shut off again.

This would not damage the battery any more than any normal charge/discharge cycles would during that time. In fact fewer cycles would likely occur!

You are wrong is in your suggestion that the battery can sit on the charger for several months before it will be topped up again. The charger will kick in to top up the battery much sooner than that. You're roughly off by a factor of ten.

Getting the last few percentage of charge into a lithium battery is one of the hardest things for a lithium battery. Charging from 98% to 100% does similar wear and tear to charging from 25% to 100%

I’d recommend everyone spend some time at the Battery University website. They’re an excellent battery info resource, esp important for the newer chemistries nowadays…

https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-409-charging-lithium-ion

If MPB had the equipment to do a full load test on each battery and reported a % for remaining life, then they might be worth considering. As it is, you are buying a complete unknown.

But you don’t know if they do or they don’t! It’d be good instead to get a definitive answer from them (and from Canon Refurb for that matter). A good job for you?

R2

Whether or not MPB tests their used batteries is irrelevant if they do not post the test results for each battery, or at least publish a minimum threshold that every battery must attain. A battery from MPB could 10 years old with a 50% capacity or a year old with 98% capacity.  There is no way of knowing aside from purchasing the battery and doing your own testing