Hi guys, after a lot of readings on this forum it seems that Trustfire Flame 18650 2400 mA is pretty good for budget battery.
How ever since I am novice in this kind, is there any suggestion how to distinguish between the original and the fake ? Any specific marks / sign to indicate the original battery?
You might find the pictures in this thread interesting, sugiarto. What happened was, basically, that a few of us jumped on a "too good to be true" deal, which in a completely shocking turn of events turned out to be too good to be true. ;)
Distinguishing between a protected TF 18650 and its unprotected brother is fairly easy: just check for the presence of the PCB near the bottom of the battery; whether it works reliably and as advertised is, of course, an entirely different matter. But realistically, anyone can grab a couple of thousand discarded, old 18650 laptop batteries from a salvage operation and slap a Trustfire label on them. In other words, some fakes may be better than others and there really isn't any foolproof way to tell a fake from the real thing (whatever that may be, because the real TFs may or may not all be coming from the same place - we simply don't know) because the latest batch of fakes may not look like the last batch.
I am with Buwuve, personally. DX sells a ton of these batteries and they're almost a fixture in the "top sellers" list, but I haven't heard anyone report any issues over there, aside from the occasional DOA battery. That's why I tend to just grab a couple of sku.20392 from DX when I need more 18650s. There are other retailers that sell them for less but until I hear something to the contrary, I think it's fairly safe to assume that DX won't send me any fakes.