Charge!

Not being able to get replacement batteries for my Canon Z9 camcorder. They're proprietary and Canon doesn't make them anymore. The camera is fine but the batteries only hold 10 minutes worth of charge. Thanks Canon!

On some but not all older battery packs that are NiMH or NiCad, they are just made from a few standard 1.2v rechargeable cells that you can get anywhere.

A savy DIYer can carefully open up the pack and replace the cells, with a bad battery pack you don't have much to lose.

I have done this for a couple of older video cameras and it has worked well.

Good idea! I'll have to try that.

They should have a charger, with a separate USB cord, I have used my pc to charge my phone for years.

This needs to be extended to camcorders

I hope to see a common ink pack for printers, moving away from this idea of giving away a printer and charging a fortune for ten cents of ink.

It will be interesting to see how sincere governments are about CO2 emissions and whether they will force more industry standardisation of equipment and parts also reliability in order to achieve this.

If they do not try to do this then all there moaning and groaning about carbon credits and alternative energy and how we the public will have to pay more for this will expose them as money grubbing politicians working out more ways to rip us off. I would like to hear from any CR4 members where their governments has made strong representations about this sort of thing, I have not heard much in Australia.

Garth.

Australia has its own web page, also see the G20 and Kyoto agreements.

Reductions of 80 are essential over the nezt 30 years:

www.climatechange.gov.au/emissionstrading/index.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWfb0VMCQHE&feature=related

regards

This has been a pet peeve of mine for many years! I have a LARGE box of 'bricks' I've saved over the years. Rarely am I able to use one from my collection to replace a blown one without changing the connector, and almost never can I use one as is...

There should be perhaps 3 standard voltages (eg. 6, 12, and 24 V), and a standard connector for each voltage. The device being charged should contain the voltage and current regulation, so any charger having the correct voltage and sufficient current capability for the device would be appropriate. Any device that needs more than 24 V should run on the local mains voltage.

I'm quite sure they have it patented, but my very favorite innovation from Apple is their Mag-Safe™ power connector. It can be plugged in either way (non-polarized), and if you trip on the cable, or forget and walk away with the cable still connected, it just disconnects without harm. I lost a previous laptop, smashing the screen when I tripped on it's power cable. I've tripped on this one quite a few times, and never a problem!

My favorite thing to hate the auto manufacturers over is wheel lug patterns.

Why does every manufacturer feel that they need to have their own lug pattern for the wheels?

The Obama administration drives me up a wall!