On 06/07/10 6:21 AM, Robert Sneddon wrote:
In , J. Clarke
writes

There appear to be two "Synergy" battery product lines, one produced by
Hahnel in Germany and the other by Synergy Digital in Brooklyn, NY.
The Hahnel product appears to be an Eneloop clone while Synergy appears
to be importing Chinese-clone OEM-replacement camera batteries.

The Sanyo Eneloop low-discharge NiMH battery technology is being
licenced more widely nowadays.

Is it being licensed or are other companies just building their
batteries in a similar manner? What Sanyo did with the eneloop product
is not rocket science--the technology for reducing self-discharge in
Nickel based batteries is not new.

The problem is that same design changes that reduce self-discharge also
reduce capacity, and we were seeing something similar to megapixel wars
with mAH wars. People just got fed up enough with self-discharge that
they were willing to go with eneloop AA cells at 2000mAH versus regular
NiMH AA cells which have up to 50% greater capacity.

While the eneloop, and other low self-discharge cells, solve one of the
major problems with NiMH cells, they still have most of the drawbacks of
AA cells in general, and NiMH cells in particular.

More information is available at "http://batterydata.com/".