The best upgrade for camera batteries is embarrassingly obvious – so why won’t camera brands do it?

A few weeks ago, I picked up a third-party NP-FZ100 battery from Neewer. This isn’t really about that battery specifically – it’s perfectly decent, it fits my camera, holds a respectable charge, and costs a lot less than Sony’s own official version ($22.49 / £26.99 at Amazon). But what really caught my attention was a small feature that has now completely changed how I think about camera batteries: a USB-C port built directly into the battery.

Third-party batteries have been steadily including this more and more over the last few years, and it now seems blindingly obvious, but this is one of the most substantial upgrades to camera batteries for a very long time, and I can’t stop wondering why major manufacturers aren’t going for this.

It means you can plug a cable straight into the battery and charge it exactly like you would your phone, laptop, tablet, headphones, power bank, or essentially almost any other device you might have bought in the last five to ten years.

We’ve spent years standardising almost every other electronic device around USB-C, and camera bodies themselves have largely converged on the one universal port. Yet somehow, camera batteries, the thing we most often need to top up while travelling or on location, are still mostly stuck with proprietary, bulky plastic wall chargers that are easy to forget at home, take up precious space in a bag, and feel like a technology relic.

Most cameras have in-camera charging now, which, don’t get me wrong, is incredibly handy, but it only lets you charge one battery at a time, and either tethers the camera to the wall while you do it, or leaves you with a power bank precariously dangling off your camera. Or with USB-C ports built into the batteries themselves, you can charge as many spare batteries as you’ve got cables to hand, and still use your camera as normal.

You can even buy rechargeable AA and CR2 batteries – yep, the little batteries that power film cameras or light meters – with USB-C ports built directly into them. If even increasingly outdated CR2 batteries can modernize their charging, it’s hard to argue that current camera batteries can’t.

Camera batteries seem to be one of the areas that seem to get the least love from camera manufacturers, although are arguably the most essential part of a camera (seriously, try taking a photo without one). While I’m sure it helps camera manufacturers' bottom line by selling more batteries and more chargers, it feels like putting profits ahead of something genuinely useful for consumers.

I didn’t really expect buying a new battery to elicit an opinion about anything, but alas, I’ve unintentionally become an advocate that every camera battery should have a USB-C port built in – and the big camera brands need to get with the program.

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