Daniel Ray And The Zombies...

Daniel, the tech, has a special relationship with electricity. It's always entertaining to see the blue flash and watch him fly across the room trailing sparks. That's what you get when you repair studio flashes with big capacitors... But on a more modest note, he has mentioned that some people are giving up on dead batteries needlessly. Oh, he doesn't mean car batteries or throw-away AA cells - he means the lithium ion batteries that power our camera and flashes. Here's the fatal scenario: The casual user takes a few pictures and then puts the camera away - where it lies untouched for several months. The charge in the battery slowly decays, until it goes down to 0.0 volts. Flat as a flitter. The user then wants to take a picture and the camera doesn't respond. Tschk...so the battery is put into the charging block...and the charging block refuses to light up - it won't charge the dead battery. Tschk again...and the photographer stumps off to a shop and buys a new battery. Good for the sales in the shop, but what the shooter didn't realise was that the battery need not have been written off - it may have been revived. You see, the charge blocks do a preliminary trick of reading of the voltage in a battery when you clip it into the socket - to see what voltage will be needed at what amperage. If the battery in there has no way to respond, the block thinks that nothing is clipped in, and gives you the wave-off signal. Step in Daniel, the Zombie Killer. He can put what you think is a dead battery under a super-charge for a few minutes, and respark life into it. Then the block will recognise it, start the charge cycle, and bring it up to working voltage again. Daniel says that the results from the battery after that is very much like it would have been all along the life - you need not buy a new one. I disagree - you need to buy a second battery for every camera you own - this sort of thing - and it's little brother of the battery going flat while you're shooting - will happen again. Get that second battery, keep it charged, and laugh at fate. Note: The lithium ion battery has a much longer life and a much easier time than the older Ni-Cad batteries or the NiMh ones. It is a boon to the camera user - but the lithium-ion cell can still go bad. If it does your camera can suffer from it. The problem is chemical reaction inside producing gas and making the battery case start to swell. I detected this with one camera when the battery started to be hard to insert - and harder to retrieve from the tight-fitting compartment. Placing the battery on a plane surface showed that it was beginning to bulge. In this case, you risk it becoming jammed inside. I sighed and consigned it to the battery recycle box that the council provides. And I bought another battery.