Leica Monochrom Battery Source?

[filmtwit]

ANy good leads on picking up gen 1 Monochrom batteries (non-leica)?
The last two I got via Amazon were good, but quickly degraded and only hold a minimum charge after a few uses now.

I know, you get what you pay for, but this shouldn't that hard either.

[icebear]

Just get the original, it will save you a lot of aggrevation you will have when getting the cheap stuff, experiencing exactely what you decribe and then finally you'll get the original that you should have gotten in the first place ... make sense? You're welcome.

[Fjäll]

I got 6 batteries with my second-hand Leica M9 which only 2 were original. The other 4 are from 3 different brands and are all really lousy.

[Richard G]

There may not be consensus on the SanDisk 8G Extreme SD cards and these cameras but there is on non-OEM batteries for digital Leicas.

[icebear]

If you have a Leica that by chance (or design) uses the exact same type of battery as a Panasonic camera, then you can get the Panasonic battery which works perfectly fine.

The Q is such an example. The M9 (or MM) don't have this "semi-OEM" work around.

[filmtwit]

So, I've been expermenting with 2 of my no-name'd Amazon bm9/monochrom batteries.
First I picked up a cheap battery charger as I wondered if the Leica battery charger might be at the heart of the problem of why these two batteries will only hold 10% charge after being used 2-3 times. As the batteries were already charged, I wanted to run them dry before trying the new charger.

So spent about 30-45 minutes with the first battery in my Monochrom, just clicking away and expecting the battery to go poop ater 50 or so clicks. But it took maybe a 100 clicks and after receiving 2-3 messages of a low battery and the camera stopped clicking. I turned it off and back on again, just to make sure I had drained it dry. But found that now the battery was at 75% full marker when I clicked on "Info."

What?

I did the above again with second battery and again came back with the same results.

I've used the cheap charger and recharged one battery back to 95%.

Now to use the camera and see what results I get.

Oy Vay.

[mark_pw]

I've bought half a dozen from eBay some days ago. They cost me less than $150. They are still working well.