For my sins, I lurk on another list (a pale ghost of this one it has to be said) and saw a very interesting post that raised my awareness about batteries. It may or may not be true, but here is food for thought. The thread originated from someone enquiring if anyone had had problems using 3rd party (and much cheaper) batteries in EOS DSLRs. For those that don't know, they use proprietary Lithium Ion units that Canon sells, at extortionate rates. *ist D owners will revel in their ability to use off- the-counter AAs after reading this!
-------------------- >Is there any reason *not* to use generic BP-511 li-ion batteries in a Canon >10D? I see 1600mAh capacity ones there for less than $10. Many companies these days use questionable and I think downright unethical practices with regards to their products. Cell phones are the first to come to mind. They warn you that using third party batteries is dangerous because they might be of inferior quality, leak, or explode. What they don't tell you is that the phone cryptographically queries the battery to find out if it is an official (from the same phone company) battery, and if it isn't then the phone changes its power consumption profile to specifically damage the battery. I can't, strangely, find a reference to back this claim up however, because there are so many web pages that hit when I search for it. I can however easily find sources for my next example. Printers also cryptgraphically authenticate their toner cartridges, forcing the consumer to use expensive versions from the manufacturer instead of cheaper versions available from the "free market". The easiest example is Lexmark versus Static Control, available at http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000305.html. Static Control was found to have violated copyright laws and the DMCA (twice) by copying the Lexmark cryptographic program into their own toner cartridges to allow their cartidges to be used in Lexmark printers. On this list I've seen people theorize that Canon goes out of its way to make Tamron and Sigma lenses incompatable with the new versions of cameras. They might. Given how unethical the Digital Rebel is (look at the Russian firmware hacks to see how easy it was to activate the functionality in the 300D that is merely turned off by a simple flag) and it might make you wonder about Canons attitude towards consumers. The Digital Rebel, deep down, is a full blown 10D with a cheap plastic shell and fewer buttons, with quite a bit of functionality compiled in and merely turned off. The Canon battery has four pins on it. One labeled +, one labeled -, one labeled B, and one labeled D. That is one more pin than they need to implement a serial interface to the battery. There is more than enough room in there for a microprocessor that could authenticate itself upwards to the camera. I haven't opened a battery up to see what is inside it, and I can't find a website that talks about it, so we really don't know. A Canon camera could, either now or something in the future, decide to maliciously attack a non-Canon battery placed inside it. Years ago I new a man who kept his television in a back room down some steps. The television faced away from the door towards a couch with a featureless wall behind it. The television was chained and padlocked to the floor, and the man never sat in front of the television or ever watched it. He chained it down so that it couldn't "walk around the house at night and look at things". If you pointed out that he could just not own a television his reply was "But then they might suspect." I'm looking forward to buying a new washing machine. One of the machines I looked at touts its advanced features and tells you they improve its washing. It can detect the dirt and soap in the water, to precisely control the washing environment. It can also supposedly detect what clothes you are washing to customize and tune their washing to get them the cleanest possible. Wow, that all sounds great. And it also wants you to plug a phone line into the back of the washing machine so that it can receive updates from the manufacturer to improve your washing experience. My immediate thought was that, deep down, I really don't want my washing machine calling up some corporation to tell them details of when I wash, how frequently I wash, how dirty my clothes are, and possibly even what clothes I wash (I got the impression it could tell colors from whites which means it has a camera hidden somewhere). Today we live in an age when lots of things monitor you. There are trash cans that scan the UPC codes of your trash as you throw it away, cars that not only track your location and send stealth uplinks back to the company (although the Supreme Court has currently forbid this due to the implementation disabling a safety feature you can expect it will be reworked and will secretly reappear), cell phones that track you via GPS and silently update your location via the cell network, and even cars that monitor your mood themselves and will photograph you on its own (without outside human interaction) if it thinks a photograph will be appropriate. Corporations are fighting tooth and nail to prevent losing money to competitors, and the DMCA is a valuable tool against the free market for them. I trust Canon to work well with its own products, and the Digital Rebel has shown me that they really don't have anything but their own selfish intrests in mind. I would not be suprised if Canon queried its battery to find out what kind it is, and I wouldn't be suprised if they tried to cause problems for competing batteries inside their camera. I currently don't they do, or else it would already be known about, but I think it is the trend in business and the day will come when it will happen. I'll stick with official batteries myself. This got a lot more Corporate/Political than I really intended, but I think it is still on topic. - -- void *(*(*schlake(void *))[])(void *); /* http://www.nmt.edu/~schlake/ */ ----------------------------------------- Cheers, Cotty ___/\__ || (O) | People, Places, Pastiche ||=====| www.macads.co.uk/snaps _____________________________
