M9-P batteries

[john neal]

Now I have a M9-P I think I should get a couple of spare batteries, especially as I'm likely to take it away from civilisation at times.

Apart from taking out a small mortgage to buy a couple of genuine Leica ones, does anyone know of a good after market make?

I have bought off-brand batteries for other cameras and been very disappointed Probably serves me right for buying off the video game) and I'm keen to avoid that again

Suggestions welcome 🙂

 

[hepcat]

I have five batteries for my M8 and M9P. Two are genuine OEM, three are cheap after-markets. Don't bother with the after-market batteries. They work, but they're endlessly frustrating both in charging and use. Voltage-wise they match the OEMs, but functionally they lack the electronics of the OEMs so the battery indicators fail to read accurately much of the time. What I've learned to do is to shoot the cheap ones until they die, and then replace them with the OEMs so I really know how much I have left. The after-market batteries show the charge accurately if they're discharged completely and recharged... but that's the only time. My advice is to just buck it up and buy OEM.

 

[swoop]

The oem batteries are really the only option. Buying the aftermarket batteries is just a waste of money. I.had four genuine batteries and two aftermarket. The genuine batteries work fine. The aftermarket batteries I had were the Adorama Power2000 and the standard issue eBay battery. They were both awful. One would always read empty, which is annoying because the M9 gets really angry when the battery is low and constantly interrupts you to remind you the battery is low. The other would sometimes indicate power but would only work for a couple dozen photos before it died. I just stopped using them and shelved them.

What makes the problem worse is that the reliability of the M9 is heavily dependent on fresh batteries. When you run the battery down to about 10% weird things start to happen like the camera locking up and image files not being written. This issue is always resolved by putting in a fresh battery. It was such an issue Leica updated the firmware so the battery read dead sooner. This issue used to happen at about 30% battery life left. It's not a make or break issue for the camera. You just have to look at it as the battery is actually dead before the camera tells you it is. That said, I would get about 400 images from a fresh battery before the first low power warning and switch my battery right then. It actually worked out pretty well because an 8GB SD card holds about 400 images (in RAW). So I'd just end up changing both at the same time.

You can find used batteries online. Popflash sometimes has them and some are on ebay as well. It's not a bad deal. Most M9's see pretty low use. So any spare battery should be in good condition. And anyone who shot their M9 heavily definitely had more than one battery to cycle through.

 

[john neal]

Thanks for the input, that's what I was afraid of.

Sadly new genuine ones in the UK are rather expensive (circa GBP100 each!). I will ahve to keep my eyes open for used genuine and try a couple.