USB Camera Battery Charger Review

This gives you a pretty good idea how how much space and weight you might save by using a USB charger over a pair of traditional single battery chargers.

Having just come back from a very successful photo tour to Sri Lanka my attention, as always turns to the next photo tour - and luckily my next trip will be to the island of Madagascar in May. 

One feature that all travelling photographers get seriously obsessed with is the weight of their gear. My stuff probably weighs around 10 kilos, more if I carry a tripod, and yet more if I take my trusty EF300mm f2.8 lens which weighs 2.35kg out of its case.

As photographers we are forced to pack chargers: for batteries, cameras (where the battery is internal), smartphones, flash, and more. Then there's the power cables needed to connect everything together, plus the adapters and power boards. It all adds up. 

I recently read a blog by a US photographer in the same position - he'd decided the answer was to travel with only USB chargers. I thought this was a great idea and went in search of a local supplier.

Eventually I went to Photo Shop Studio, two mins from Bunnings in Ashfield, and bought a dual LP-E6 USB battery charger for a whopping $20.  I bought this a month ahead of the trip so I could test it thoroughly before heading to a country with little in terms of technology.

I drained an original Canon LP-E6 battery - to 3% charge - and set this up to charge using my Macbook Pro. With a single battery in the cradle, it went from 3% to 99% in 3.5 hours, not a bad result for a battery that has a red bar in its recharge performance indicator (i.e. three green bars indicates it's in tip top condition, two bars is 'OK' , and a red bar indicates that the battery is on its last legs...

Mine are probably 10 years old and have been worked hard so it's not surprising it was on its last legs.