That’s What I Say!

I purchased this Panasonic Lumix TZ7 off eBay for a good price. But I wanted a couple of spare batteries as I want to use it as a camcorder as well as a camera - aparently its good for that but it sucks the battery dry very quickly.

Checking into it I find that Panasonic decided that it would be in their interest if they would make it as difficult as possible for people to buy aftermarket batteries - so they built into the firmware (v1.2 or greater) the ability to check if the battery is a genuine Panasonic one or not. Now the genuine one is four times more expensive than the aftermarket ones and does not have as much capacity. The genuine one which came with the Lumix is 895mAh and aftermarket batteries can be as large as 1250mAh. If you use the flash a lot and the video recording feature then this is very important.

So before I could purchase a couple of after-market batteries I had to find out what the current firmware is. I could not find it through the menu system of the camera so what to do? I tried looking through Google and found lots of articals about how to upgrade/downgrade the firmware but not to see which firmware is already installed.

Anyway, I found it by accident. If you take a picture, then transfer it to your PC then you can right click on it in windows and see the properties which contains a lot of information about the shot. In one of these fields it stated the software as being 1.2

So I guess my firmware is v1.2 - which I beleive includes the check on the battery! Oh happy days!! Well I have ordered a couple of batteries from an eBay seller anyway which they (the eBay seller) say has a new chip in which will fool the TZ7 into thinking it has a genuine battery. I hope they work. If not I guess I will have to try and downgrade to v1.1

The TZ7 seems to be a good camera, but I cant help thinking the battery issue is a scam or hustle to get you to purchase a massively overpriced and inferior manufacturer battery.