Bizarrely Good Value Things in Modern Life

[Smurf1976]

Interesting; with batteries I have tended to shell out for the more expensive if is going in a new product that I care about, for old stuff just the cheapest as long as it's listed as recommended for the particular device.

At home well if the battery in your cheap torch or kids' toys or whatever dies well then it's no big deal. Replace it and carry on.

It's very different however when it comes to things like professional use electrical and electronic test instruments, medical monitoring devices, wireless microphones and in-ear monitors used on stage, data collection equipment that's placed out in the field to collect information about whatever and so on.

In that case the device itself is worth serious $ and it not functioning may also have serious implications. In that situation it's not so much about how long the battery lasts since within reason that's not a major problem. What matters is that lifespan is consistent and predictable, it doesn't fail unexpectedly, and crucially that it doesn't spill its guts into the equipment and ruin it.

For those not aware, a lot of professional use equipment does in fact use ordinary consumer size batteries - D, C, AA, AAA and 9V. Reason = available everywhere so the equipment can easily be used anywhere on earth without obtaining batteries being a problem.

From that perspective and so far as consumer brand batteries you can buy in any supermarket etc are concerned, the basic issue is that some big brands have excellent quality control but one has over the past few years become the exact opposite and is now notorious for sudden failure and leaks. Great when they work, capacity is indeed high and they last a long time as claimed, but terrible quality control and prone to spilling their corrosive guts suddenly without warning makes them totally unsuitable for serious applications.

Bottom line is that depending on which big brand you compare them to, generic brands may well be better value, or even an actually better product, than some of the big brands these days. Depends what you compare it to.

I've avoided naming names because they probably do have a team of lawyers and so on but suffice to say I've done my research, it's an informed comment.

If you want a really strange thing about batteries, well two rival big name manufacturers both use the same marketing in different countries. In Australia, Duracell is the brand with the pink rabbits. Go to the US and Energizer uses the same pink rabbit to sell their product. Why? Well it turns out that whoever came up with it first didn't trademark the idea globally, leaving the door open to the competition to copy the exact same marketing in other countries. Seriously.

 

[frugal.rock]

<can't remember the right term for a wine boffin>

A Sommelier perhaps?

It came to me whilst making coffee this morning.

Then I had to remember why my brain had the request to plumb that useless piece of information from its depths...

It's like an old computer (my brain), I give it a memory request, it does a logic check and comes back with true or false immediately, ie memory or no memory.
The actual memory retrieval though can be slower than Australia Post and turns up just as randomly too... ?

 

[Smurf1976]

It's like an old computer (my brain)

Cut a notch in the disk and use the other side.

Now that idea does go back quite some time.... It worked though and saved the cost of another disk back when they weren't cheap.

 

[e_abrams]

The Internet is such a thing, I think. Instant communication globally and instant access to information globally. Only fifty years ago that would've seemed like a fairy tale.