That’s Panasonic NCR18650G 3600 mAh (G and not well known GA 3500mAh), mostly bought by Tesla so it’s hard to find them on market. You can still get them in some repacks (keeppower, klarus, olight, orbtronic … ), tho.
There’s not much capacity difference compared to 3500mAh cells, but I am correcting you for the sake of accuracy anyway. Klarus does not advertise this falsely and then just rewrap Sanyo NCR18650GA 3500mAh. They use here Panasonic NCR18650G 3600mAh.
There’s another example of Keeppower “18650G” 3600 mAh repack:
Many sellers that don’t specialize in batteries, from GearBest to Amazon, sell Ultrafire and other very questionable brands. That’s not an issue unique to GearBest. In fact, these sites sometimes have problems with 3rd party sellers taking old, crappy batteries and putting a new Samsung/LG/Panasonic wrapper on them and selling them as new, higher capacity batteries. If you really want to be safe when it comes to batteries, I would recommend sticking to places that specialize in them. Illumn, IMR Batteries, Li-Ion Wholesale, and a few others in the United States, and nkon.com in Europe, to name a few. But those places also tend to be more expensive.
The other option is to get an analyzing charger - Bilakos frequently posts deals on the Liitokala Lii 500 and Zanflare C4. These chargers can measure the capacity of the cells. So you can order (name brand - Samsung/Sony/LG/etc.) batteries from GearBest or BangGood, and just run a test cycle on them. As long as the reported capacity agrees with the claimed capacity, you should be fine.
As far as safety… Will these Ultrafire batteries kill you? Doubtful. But start a fire? It might not be likely, but I would not rule out the possibility. The cheap batteries they use may or may not include the safety mechanisms that are incorporated in the high quality Samsung/Sony/etc. batteries. You just don’t know, and it’s not worth the risk.
If you’re talking about the single battery tube version, it’s not great. It’s too short for button tops and even flat tops are tight. I ordered 3 and 1 didn’t work. Didn’t load test, just made sure they would power up a small device. For the price, I wouldn’t expect much or plan to use for anything other than last resort. I have Tomo power banks with LCD current display for normal use.
Thanks for the correction. Completely forgot the NCR18650G was thing, because you never see it for sale anywhere. Where are these manufacturers sourcing those, if stores focusing on batteries, like Illumn or IMR Batteries, don’t even carry them?
That’s what happens when you are mass producing in a large scale.
The first production batches usually don’t provide any income, but once the R&D expenses are covered, you are essentially left with a minimal production cost.
