Yes, you’re right. I’ve never received cells with internal resistance this high and so uniformly. All of my previous 30Qs are around the 60 mohm mark. I’d expect such high readings for used cells, not brand new. I’m confused; am I missing something here? :S Also, never received a new cell that’s down to 3.46v before.
There was another thread about fake sammy cells with that sticker from Aliexpress somewhere here in BLF like days ago.
You need to make further testing on these cells, I've received perfectly fine 30Qs at such low voltages.
However it seems at least some chinese cell distributor is a crook, so beware. Received AliExpress email from my seller (AM battery Store) recently and for now it seems he/she is unwilling to bear responsibility, so we'll see. 
Cheers :-)
Just buy them from Banggood with a deal from M4dM4X then, i bought a set of those last year and they read around 30mΩ last week
Plenty of countries cannot purchase Lithium batteries from Banggood or Gearbest, leaving some stores on Ali as the only option. I have ordered batteries 4 times from Ali, and been refunded twice. One lot is still on delivery.
Best service by far was from electronic apartment store , but they do not sell 18650’s!
Hi Threadneedle, with those internal resistances it will never deliver the current you want in your flashlights, the color of the batteries are too dark compared to original 30Q, that can be camera issue but the color on their store is also too dark. Further if you check how many batteries they sell, it is pretty low for a store 3 years old. Open a dispute to get your money back, if a store sells fake stuff there is no need to write to them because they do everything to not pay you back, so make sure to do a capacity test before opening the dispute and provide pictures with it.
That being said, I order a lot 18650 batteries from Aliexpress for my vaping needs. I check always highest sold batteries and their feedbacks, most customers will post a picture like yours with tests. The batteries from these stores are little bit more expensive (like 2 to 4 dollar) but you will be sure you get the real deal.
I buy my 18650’s mostly from Liitokala Official Store, they have all brands (LG, Sanyo, Samsung, Panasonic and Sony) and never had problems with their batteries, feedbacks are good with some testing pictures, but they are pretty slow with shipment. Unfortunately Liitokala does not sell 30Q button tops, they have 26FM button tops with 2600mAh.
I needed 30Q button tops for my BLF Q8, like Yokiamy said I ordered these from Banggood, I hope they ship to UK.
Do a complete charge/discharge/recharge cycle first. I’ve seen the resistance go down after a full cycle with new batteries. May just be my charger, idk
The colour doesn’t look right to me , mine are a lighter shade of pink.
I just got 4 button top 30Qs from Nkon and another 8 flat top from Gearbest and I would say they’re a lighter shade of pink. Some of the button top ones have shown higher IR that’s gone down once charging is under way.
Clean the contacts as well. I had some BT VTC6s which initially had high IR but were ok after swabbing with metholated spirits.
For your information, button tops are added by a 3rd party and they're attached with a flimsy nickel strip. This can indeed have some sort of impact over the full cell's resistance.
I avoid purchasing products which try to force me to use button tops.
Cheers :-)
Originally posted on Thu, 02/08/2018 - 22:41; edited for a little typo fix up.
Another revealing clue for those willing to hear: What do you believe is an “official” store and what does this means to you?
I say this because the only thing which actually identifies an AliExpress store is its number. Any AliExpress store is accesible via a link with this format: https://[StoreID.]aliexpress.com/store/StoreNumber, where the stuff in brackets is optional (can use the classic “www.”).
All of the links below point to the same store:
- https://liitokalahongkong.aliexpress.com/store/217753
- https://www.aliexpress.com/store/217753
- https://aliexpress.com/store/217753
Cheers my dears :-)
P.S.: the store I've been recently dealing with, AM battery Store, was once known as “Colaier Direct Sales Store”.
mine was never arrive so i got refunded
The color is a bit off
I have bough more than 24 30Qs from GB and BG and never arrived at such low voltage
In every cell the sticker is on the exact same place hiding part of the code, (not that they can’t fake the code though)
The only thing left to do is to fully charge one and test it with a triple direct drive.
I received a batch of 30Q from Gearbest lately and the voltage was between 3.4 and 3.5.
I got some 30Qs from Mountain Electronics 3 weeks ago and they came with 3.4 volts.
My 30Q’s are from Liionwholesale in the US. Welded on buttons and resistance is around 40 each cell
I have only a few 30Qs on hand and I forgot to test the voltage when I first received them… (my next 2 orders of 30Qs never arrived…)
However, I’ve gotten a bunch of Sony VTC6 (which have correct capacity and low resistance upon testing) — all their initial voltage when I got them was 3.46-3.47v (on my digital multimeter).
Charge them up fully then take the measurement. Ir is supposed to be taken on a full cell. It goes up as the cell is depleted. And 3.4 volts the cell is almost empty and has a button top added which will make it go up some. All my button tops have higher ir then there unprotected siblings. They maybe fake but taking the measurement at full will tell a lot more. If it’s still that high at full I’d start a dispute but it should go down
Despite being an industry standard, to me AC internal resistance testing can be used to track cell health but not much else. Also, rail contact resistances matter (a lot). I've being tinkering with my Lii-500 and yes, rail resistance can vary a lot between insertions. However, since charger measures IR on startup it is easy to do a few cell re-seatings until we identify the lowest values (which I'd consider and average instead of averaging all obtained figures) which show up when rail contact resistances are at minimums. This also matters for cell binning since a high contact resistance on a given rail put that rail's cell at a disadvantage versus its neighbours: the higher the rail resistance the less energy/charge will go into the cell (because of the cut-off current value) and the higher will be the actual cell voltage cut-off because of a larger delta between rail and cell voltage (dV = Icharge × Rrail). 
Cheers 