[Leica] more info on Leica M9 & third party batteries

[kyle cassidy on the lug]

so … recap of what i’ve figured out so far:

1) I have four third party batteries for my m9 and one “real” battery.
2) M9 thinks the third party batteries lose their charge almost instantly and go to “battery low” warning that blocks the screen
3) volt meter thinks the batteries are still charged

so … update:

I discovered while tooling around in the manual that when the “warning: battery low” screen comes on, pressing “set” tells the camera to ignore the warning and pressing the shutter release immediately after makes it go away, if not permanently, then for a very long time (like days) after that, while the battery will still show up on the “info” section as having a charge of about 4% it’s actually fully charged and you can continue using it. The downside is that you don’t necessarily know how uncharged it is without getting a volt meter out because for some reason the M9 either can’t or refuses to read the voltage of non-leica batteries consistently (sometimes it will display the charge accurately, but i haven’t found a pattern to it yet), although they power the camera fine (people here have said “nay” but I’m still thinking there might be some sort of propriatary chipping in the OEM batteries). So, upside, you can get four M8/M9 batteries for $40 on eBay, and have enough juice for two weeks of heavy work without recharging as long as you don’t need to know the exact level of the charge. 

My experience is that one battery lasts about five days of regular (~75-200 photos/day) shooting. 

kc