Bought them this Dec 22th 2017 and arrived home on Jan 15th 2018. I've recently hooked one of 'em to my (yet to publish review) Sofirn C8F discharge rig, and my initial testing has been underwhelming. A known good Samsung 30Q cell goes above 9.6 cold start amps in turbo, such VTC5A under same conditions only did ≈8.6A. Alarm bells ringed…
Hope to receive a Lii-500 analyzing charger soon, I'll be able to test their capacity. In the meantime, ¿do you think these are degraded old stock?
I just paid $24.80 (20.96€) for them but this is no excuse. Once the capacity figures come out I'll take a decision with regards to going the dispute way, but I'd like to hear from you as they seem to work well. As Duke Nukem said, damn!
There is something fishy about the date code. I found this spec sheet on the LIION Wholesale website.
Scroll down to 6.5 to decipher the date code. After the 9 there should be an electrode code.
I just got some old stock VTC6 from Tumera as well. February 2016 date code. Two of my six batteries have a day code in the 50’s. That number should not be higher than 28 unless it was one hell of a leap year.
I have a Lii-500, did two capacity tests with three of the VTC6’s and a fairly new button top 30q. The VTC6’s have a tiny bit less capacity than the 30q. Testing one of the Sony’s against the Samsung showed similar performance at low current. Direct driving three xp-l hi’s was about 15 amps for both batteries. Six xpl-hi’s and the 30q pulled about 20 amps and climbed as the led’s got hot. The VTC6’s did about 19 and slowly dropped as the led’s heated.
The VTC6’s should be the better cell but are not. I’m not happy about getting old stock or possibly high quality fake batteries but they work, don’t know if Tumera is dishonest or if they have a bad supplier. Not going to open a dispute but didn’t leave the nicest feed back. This was my first Ali Express purchase and I want to see how they react before spending any more money there.
My testing was a tad hasty, I'll do some more tests like capacity on a Lii-500 in a near future.
Yes date codes seem odd, no electrode code. If these are fakes they may probably use some decent chinese OEM high discharge cell under the wrap, or also probably VTC5 cells.
Still not a bad deal it seems, but fishy stuff as you say. Can't dispute anyway, only 15 days of time frame since confirming delivery.
Oct 9th 2016.