Which will give the most bang for your buck?
Alkalines, the new-fangled lithium ones or the stalwart carbon zinc batteries? Find out which will give you long lasting energy in this battery shootout. -ST
Sat, Mar 21, 2009
The Straits Times, Digital Life
by Tan Chong Yaw
Compared to old-technology carbon zinc batteries, alkalines cost about 35 cents more per battery but they pack more power and store longer.
Which will give the most bang for your buck? Alkalines, the new-fangled lithium ones or the stalwart carbon zinc batteries?
DL did a shootout of five types of batteries (See table). These range from amazingly cheap carbon zinc PenesamiG batteries to the Panasonic Evolta - a super alkaline - and Energizer e2 lithium.
In the middle are the ones that line most supermarket shelves - alkalines like the Duracell and Energizer Max.
The batteries were bought from FairPrice supermarkets except the PenesamiGs, which were bought at Sheng Siong Supermarket.
A flashlight and camera were used to test the single-use AA batteries.
The flashlight has one light-emitting diode (LED) bulb and runs on a single AA battery. The time taken from the moment the flashlight was switched on until the light died was recorded.
The test camera was Canon's PowerShot SX1 which uses four AA batteries. With the LCD switched on and flash firing for every shot, the number of shots snapped until the camera shut down on its own was noted.
Clearly at the bottom was the PenesamiG - it could not even power up the camera and lasted a paltry three minutes in the flashlight.
In the camera test, the e2 tied with the Max in being cheapest to run on a cost per photo basis. However, the e2 lasts longer than four Max batteries.
The Max and Duracell, both alkalines, tied for being most economical to run in the flashlight test.
Alkalines are best-sellers because they offer a good performance-cost balance. Alkaline batteries make up about 70 per cent of FairPrice's battery sales, said Tng Ah Yiam, its integrated purchasing director.
cytan@sph.com.sg
 Photo: ST, Ashleigh Sim |
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Watt's the difference?
WE GIVE the lowdown on three kinds of batteries. Carbon zinc This grandfather of dry cell batteries first appeared on the market in 1887. The battery uses a zinc chloride and ammonium chloride electrolyte with a cathode of manganese dioxide and carbon, and a zinc anode. Great for low-drain devices like clocks, remote controls and radios. Price per battery: 5 to 55 cents Alkaline Alkaline batteries made their debut in 1959 using an alkaline electrolyte of potassium hydroxide - instead of the acidic one in the carbon zinc battery - upping the battery's power and shelf life. Price per battery: 85 to 95 cents Lithium This new kid on the block appeared in 1989. Not to be confused with rechargeable lithium-ion batteries although both use the same metal - lithium. These batteries have a lithium anode, iron disulphide on aluminium foil cathode and a lithium salt electrolyte. Lithium is so flexible, batteries can be built with almost 20 times more active area than alkalines. Lithium batteries have the longest shelf life and juice in powering tech devices like digital cameras. It can be used for any purpose - if you can afford it. Price per battery: $3.80 |
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Dos and don'ts
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Clarification
(Updated 3 April 2009)
IN OUR story, 'Pocket power', published on March 18, we compared several AA batteries, including Duracell Alkaline, Energizer Alkaline Max and Panasonic Evolta, to see which of them offered the best performance for price.
The article did not indicate how we arrived at the unit cost of each battery in our test.
We would like to clarify that we used 12-packs for the Duracell Alkaline and Energizer Alkaline Max batteries. For the Panasonic Evolta, we used the four-pack, which is the biggest pack available for sale.
Prices were for batteries from NTUC FairPrice at Junction 8.
We are now adding the price of the four-pack Duracell and Energizer Max batteries for greater clarity and the new cost per battery is now reflected in the table (below).
In our earlier camera test, on a Canon Powershot SX1, a shot costs 2cents using the Duracell and 1.1cents using the Max.
For the flashlight test, the cost came up to 0.8cents per minute with the Duracell and 0.8cents using the Max.
This article was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life.
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