Much research has gone into making a lithium-ion battery that recharges faster. One organization previously reported a battery that they could recharge, in the lab, in around 30 seconds.

It appears that Toshiba is now relasing a commercially viable quick-recharge battery for forklifts. While this does not directly apply to camera batteries at this time, the technology may be adapted to our use in the future.

Toshiba's Super Charge ion Battery, or SCiB, can recharge to 90 percent of its full capacity in less than five minutes and has a life cycle of more than 10 years, according to Toshiba's press release.

http://www.manufacturing.net/Toshiba-Battery-Recharges-Fast.aspx?menuid=36

Much research has gone into making a lithium-ion battery that recharges faster. One organization previously reported a battery that they could recharge, in the lab, in around 30 seconds.

It appears that Toshiba is now relasing a commercially viable quick-recharge battery for forklifts. While this does not directly apply to camera batteries at this time, the technology may be adapted to our use in the future.

Toshiba's Super Charge ion Battery, or SCiB, can recharge to 90 percent of its full capacity in less than five minutes and has a life cycle of more than 10 years, according to Toshiba's press release.

http://www.manufacturing.net/Toshiba-Battery-Recharges-Fast.aspx?menuid=36

Dan, while it is true that there is a lot of progress being made in that direction, that is making the batteries that can discharge high currents (for power tool applications, etc.) and accept high charge current during recharge, the press releases never mention the other side of the issue. In order to quickly charge a battery, the charger has to be able to deliver higher levels of power. This makes the charger proportionately more expensive, bigger, heavier. To illustrate the point, a typical OEM charger that comes with a camera, charges the battery at about 1A-1.2A. This makes charging a high capacity battery long process, over 5 hours. The same battery can accept 2-3 AMPs without any trouble. The charger is the bottleneck, not the battery.

Dear Alex,

Thank you for your insight.

I was most amazed when I read about a Lithium-Ion battery that could be recharged in 30 seconds. Of course, to my knowledge that battery has not yet been released to the public.

It will be nice when we have high-capacity, fast-recharge batteries, and chargers to match.

I feel that we can usually find five minutes on set to recharge a battery every few hours or so.

The other interesting item about Toshiba's new battery is that they are quoting a 10 year battery lifetime.