Great after-sales camera battery boasts its own built-in USB-C charger

Now that we know it exists, we can’t believe it’s not a feature on all camera batteries. Chinese company Nitecore sells spare batteries for Sony Alpha cameras of the latest models with built-in USB-C charging, so an external charger is not required.

The UFZ100 battery is a direct replacement for the real Sony NP-FZ100, which is powered by a number of high-end Sony cameras, including a7 III TV series, a9 series and several others. It runs with almost identical specs, 7.2V and 2250mAh, which is just under 2280mAh of a real battery.

But where the Sony battery has a small LCD screen that shows the charge level, the Nitecore version uses simple colored lights, and if Sony requires an external charger, the Nitecore battery connects directly to the USB-C cable, that is, if you are with one of them as a phone charger you can also recharge the camera battery. It’s not a very fast charge – 0-100 per cent will take about four hours, about twice as long as on a stand-alone charger – but it will be very handy for many shooters on the road.

And now look, anyone who has bought Chinese batteries for aftermarket cameras will know that these things can be a little tricky in terms of how long the batteries last compared to the originals, and how well they communicate with the cameras. For what it’s worth, Nitecore says that “the rest of the battery can be displayed on the monitor” – so it seems that it will work well with at least some cameras.

In fact, it’s the kind of user-centric feature we’d like to see in OEMs.

Prices and availability of Nitecore UFZ100 battery are not yet available.

Source: Nitecore