I have no direct experience with Blazar, but they look to be keeppower OEM. Efest make top quality batteries too afaik so I personally would not question either of these cells being genuine. Maybe something to do with the testing set-up?
I would 2nd a 3 amp test on some unprotected and clearly genuine Panasonic cells to verify this if possible.
Have you considered the possibility that there may be a significant degree of resistance in your discharge setup? For example, I use cheap single bay chargers with the circuitry removed, hooked up to my Hyperion EOS1210i. One of them is unsuitable for high current discharge tests because when using it, the voltage almost immediately sags to around 3.4 when doing a 3A discharge on a fresh cell. Using the same cell in a different bay that applies significantly more contact pressure on the battery terminals (and probably has lower resistance internally as well) results in a voltage reading slightly above 3.7 at a 3A discharge, which is right where it should be for a freshly charged cell.
Discharging at 5A drives the point home. All my Blazars will fail dismally in the high resistance bay, with the setup sagging to 2.7v within seconds. In the better one, they’ll stay at just over 3.5v initially, and discharge in a much more respectable manner from there.
Even my good charging bay needs improvement I think. I’m going to get stuck into fixing them both up soon.
And you’re certain that it’s not your DMM that is doing the struggling? High resistance leads, and cheap inaccurate DMMs, are probably the true source of much of the woe regarding lower than expected current readings.
EDIT: Nevermind. If you can actually measure the superior performance of your IMR’s, I guess the variance is indeed in your cells.
I made up a new heavy duty battery carrier , and the situation remains the same , very slightly lower resistance , maybe 0.03
.
Variance between charger reported voltage and actual battery voltage remains almost 0.3v at 3A discharge …
So would be nice if some of you guys could check what your getting …
This is interesting , but I just dont have the time , exams next week , and I just did 11 hours of home work yesterday …
Time is precious ATM
But I just may need to set up a way to monitor Battery voltage during discharge so as to terminate at actual battery voltage rather than the voltage reported by the charger …
So after my exams , I may run a whole bunch of 3A discharges …
My charger reads 0.02v high when monitoring resting battery voltage (confirmed with 2 different DMMs ). Taking this into consideration, I lose a total of 0.08v between the battery and the charger during a 3A discharge with the setup I am using (again confirmed with 2 different DMMs ).
Im going to have to change the way I discharge , and go with what I have in the video , use a MM to keep an eye on battery voltage and terminate on what the MM say’s rather than trusting the Turnigy charger …
My other MM measures to 0.000 if memory serves , so looks like some work ahead of me .
I did a quick test with my Turnigy Accucel 6.
On 1 amp discharge (max on my charger) the Turnigy displayed 3.22V and my DMM displayed 3.45. Surprisingly bad…