(The other reason for opening this new thread is to share that this cell is now available.
While there was already a Deal Alert thread about the first version, I thought it would be better to open a new thread, because after all, this is a new product, thus a new Deal.
And it is much easier to find Good Deals, if they are posted in the Deal Alert forums, rather than searching through all different kind of threads about tens of different cells)
No, it is not really risky, you can find videos of people that shorts the NCR18650A. The cell can easily survive this, but it will reduce the total lifetime. According to some internal Panasonic documentation I have seen the maximum recommended continuous drain is about 3.5 ampere on the cell, if you want maximum lifetime.
As close as possible to the rated current, but to avoid accidental triggering I would prefer something like 30 to 50% above it, Panasonic shows discharge curves up to 5.9 ampere, this would give a protection around 8 ampere.
The most important thing is the over-discharge and over-charge protection. Which is judged by the voltage so in that case the current can trip at 1A or 7A and may have nothing to do with the actually drawn current at the moment.
As I can see the cell is second after Redilast in what it can do at 5A. The Redialst shows an "unsually" good curve for the Panasonic NCR18650A, (Jason is good, he knows what to send).
The current trips as I can see, identically with the Redilast 3100.
HKJ we know that a high current current can be sustained very easily for a short time. Let's say that one would discharge the cell at 10A not 11.7A, would it still finish/work down to 2.5v or the protection would trip after 3-4 minutes? Because if you keep trying to increase the current until you find that pulse point where you end up tipping the protection, the protection may very well activate at a lower constant current. In this case I mean lower 10A or 9A, just to be lower than your 10 times test on these cells.
My guess is that both batteries has 3 good transistors in the protection. This is probably also the reason for the high trip current, the protection IC measures the voltage over the transistors and if it is to high it assumes over current. When the transistors has a very low voltage drop, the current limit will be high.
Yes, the protection is temperature sensitive. I have not done any test at 10A+, except I have seen that the limit might be even higher if I test faster (I did a test where I instead of starting at 3A each time, started slightly below the last trip current).
On the EagleTac 3100 batteries I measured the trip current to 6A and the batteries could handle a 5A discharge without tripping.
But wouldn't 10A load generate a lot more heat than a 5A load? Also the Eagleatc 3100 is not giving as much capacity as the Redilast 3100 or IOS 3100 at 5A.
Does that mean if each were driven at 5A every time they were used, the Eagletac would have a longer service life?
These cells are similar in price. Disregarding price which would you choose for a high output xml? Also, would there be any difference between the two in a hard driven xpg/xre?
No, only that you would get slightly less energi out of them.
For a light that uses 3 to 5A (i.e. one battery for a XM-L) I would prefer the intl-outdoor battery, but for a xpg/xre the difference is to small to have much significance.
I agree. I was hoping for a replacement. So my 3 blue batteries that I bought in December (2 months ago) and received in late December that I paid $35.88 for are only worth $8.78 ???????? There has to be a better plan than this.