Spot Fake Canon Batteries

Here’s a post on how to spot fake Canon batteries. My friend Lamar just purchased a Canon 70D, and naturally is starting to pick up accessories. He’s going through what I did when I bought my first DSLR and what many photography hopefuls do. He’s going cheap on gear. Naturally, it’s human nature to want to save money after plopping down $1,400 or more for a new camera. Just be careful, because sometimes it’s worth buying the Canon or Nikon branded gear. Remember that “you get what you pay for” is usually the rule.

Be warned, sometimes when a price of gear is too good to be true, it might just be a fake. Case in point, Lamar ordered some new Canon LP-E6 batteries from Ebay. Normally LP-E6s are $60 a pop, but hey he found some for $20 each. But guess what? They’re fakes. Very good fakes. The only way you can tell is the hologram on the packaging does not change when rotated, as show in this official Canon website here:

Here are the pics of his LP-E6 battery, and the video showing how his hologram doesn’t change like it would on authentic Canon packaging. It’s a very impressive fake.

Aside from the hologram, I thought the batteries felt a little cheap in my hands. Also, they didn’t snap into the orange battery cover as well as I’m used to with my other LP-E6s. The cover moves a little after attached.

There are many brands of Canon battery knock-offs on eBay and Amazon. They are a lot cheaper than the branded ones and come in two varieties, chipped and non chipped. Chipped means that they have the ability to communicate with your camera. In your camera’s menu you can find battery information which displays not only how much juice is left, but also how the battery is performing during recharging.

I have a few of these non-Canon batteries and I am starting to see issues when them. They don’t hold their charge as long as Canon. They sometimes can’t communicate with the camera. Meaning they show a full charge, but Canon can’t tell anything else. And worse, one of my knockoffs wont register as a charged battery, even though my charger says it’s full. I read somewhere that non-Canon batteries don’t like being charged in Canon’s charger. That you should only charge them with the charger they came with. So perhaps if you’re going to go non-Canon, you should buy the package that comes with some kind of charger.

So ok, $60 is a lot to plop down on a branded battery. But it will work in your camera as it’s supposed to. I wouldn’t trust a firmware upgrade to anything but a Canon branded battery. And when shopping on eBay, be weary of really good priced gear shipping from China.