The battery on the NEX-7 is quite small, 1080mAh at 7.2V. With the EV, LCD and LiveView, this means that a spare battery or three is essential. I went onto Amazon to look for genuine spare NP-FW50 batteries and one seller was offering them at less than half the price of the typical seller. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. When I received the battery, the packaging looked authentic, hologram and all, but the battery itself looked subtly different from the one I got with the camera.
The major differences I can spot are:
- The battery casing is different, the suspect one does not have the grooves behind the label
- The printing is different, crisper on the genuine one, e.g. the QR code
- There is text missing on the suspect battery, “2ICP9/30/39” which appears on the genuine one
- The engraving on the bottom right is different
- The shape of the connectors on the top right is different
- The colour of the top right corner is a different shade of cyan
I’m trying to get confirmation from Sony whether the battery from Amazon is genuine or not. So far, the battery is working. It charges up and displays percentage charge remaining on the camera. I’m not familiar enough with the run time of the genuine battery to tell whether the Amazon battery has the same amount of juice. The issue however is that I could have just bought for even less money a non-fake third-party spare battery which would have performed just as well.