Last week I managed to get a second hand Panasonic Lumix TZ7 off eBay for a fantastic price. As I want to use it on my holiday as both a still camera and a camcorder I decided to get a couple of spare batteries but the Genuine replacements from Panasonic are such a high price I decided to get a couple of after-market jobbies.
After reading about how Panasonic decided to hard code into the camera the ability to detect an after-market battery and not allow the camera to function I was a bit dubious as to wether I was wasting my money.
The good news is that I have purchased two batteries off eBay and they both work fine in the camera with no issues at all. The firmware is v1.2 (which is supposed to contain the battery checking ability) but it still works OK. Happy days!
By the way - I have taken some shots with this camera and it is absolutely fantastic. However, indoors shots in iA mode with the flash enabled leaves a lot to be desired as far as exposure is concerned (the flash does not have a lot of reach). The image stabilisation is the best I have seen. Plus it has very low noise at ISO400 so I guess with a bit of practice I can get some good indoor shots.
Its overall a great piece of tech.
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.