Category Archives: Photography

Replacement Leica M10 battery – testing

Leica

Making sure it’s good.

For an index of all Leica-related articles click here.

I wrote an extended piece on the battery life of the Leica M10 here.

At the time I bought my used M10 in March, 2025 I made sure that spares were available. Though the camera was sold with a spare, the age of both batteries was unknown and I have not discovered a way of determining it. But, as soon as I took delivery of the camera all replacement supplies – and the battery is only available from Leica and its dealers – dried up. Go figure. I was staring down the barrel of a gun or, more accurately, at a potential $4,600 paperweight, and a useless camera.

So I bit my nails for a while and fretted, though both the batteries which came with the camera worked well, charged fully, and provided some 5 hours of life with the camera turned on and sleep disabled. That’s an essential setup for street photography where the 2 second ‘wake from sleep’ is unacceptably long. Further both batteries retained charge fairly well, losing maybe 5% weekly when unused, with the camera off.

Then one day I came across a listing by CameraWest in SF which showed the Leica M10 BP-SCL5 battery in stock, and immediately ordered one. A system glitch at the vendor’s end meant that in fact the battery was out of stock but their salesperson told me that they were getting small allocations from time to time and, indeed, one month after placing the order a new BP-SCL5 was in my hands, in a sealed Leica box.



The new Leica BP-SCL5 battery.

There is no indication of the age of the new battery and it ships fully discharged. I charged it in the Leica charger, a 5 hour process for the new cell, then inserted it in the M10, turned the camera on with sleep disabled and monitored the remaining charge, using the camera’s LCD display, at hourly intervals. Here are the results:

  • On installation – 100% charge
  • 1 hour later – 85%
  • 2 hours later – 50%
  • 3 hours later – 35%
  • 4 hours later – 15%
  • 4:35 hours later – 5%
  • 4:50 hours later – fully discharged

So the near 5 hour life is identical to that of the two older cells, suggesting the new one is good. I’ll see how it drains once in the camera with the camera turned off, but in the meanwhile should you succeed in snagging a new replacement, I suggest this test is worthwhile, given the $235 shipped cost of the battery.

On recharging the now flat new battery the process only took 2 hours, so it seems that the first charge (5 hours) takes much longer. The 2 hour time is similar for that of my two older batteries.

The correct use of NiMH batteries – when to recharge, how much to charge, and so on – is the subject of much confusing advice and data-light opinions. Best as I can determine there is no damage using a suitable charger which does not overcharge (the Leica charger has overcharge protection) nor is there any problem in fully discharging the battery before the next charge. It’s hard to get definitive advice, but at least I should be able to get another 5-10 years out of the new battery before consigning the M10 to a display case ….

Old Glory

Ramblings

Flying proudly.

My previous Stars & Stripes flag was a tad worse for wear and I never cared for the cheap printed design, meaning I splashed out for a higher quality stitched one with woven stars. Made in America, of course.

But this new one suffered from the same issue common to seemingly all flags mounted on an angled flagpole, namely that they get twisted around the pole in windy conditions, making for an unsightly presentation. So I determined to do something about it.

First I added two pairs of insanely powerful neodymium magnets towards the base to add heft. These certainly stopped the twirling around the pole but in high winds the magnets would adhere to the mild steel pole! And that looked even worse. Further, in a high wind the added weight generated additional force on the thin walled mild steel pole and …. the pole bent at a right angle, landing OG in the dirt.

So I added a hardwood dowel to add robustness to the pole, after some straightening and garage language, and …. a new gust of wind bent the pole and snapped the dowel like a matchstick. Clearly I was dealing with forces whose severity I did not appreciate. So off to the hardware store for two additional purchases. A length of steel rod for the inside of the pole and a three foot length of mild steel bar stock to place across the space between the magnet pairs to add stiffness to the flag and prevent the magnets from attaching themselves to the flagpole.

I first tried this arrangement transversely, the bar at right angles to the stripes and while it did the job the flag looked pretty unnatural, never coming to rest in wind free conditions. So then I tried it with the magnets on the bottom stripe and the bar stock parallel to that stripe and, bingo!, it worked perfectly and the flag looked gorgeous at rest.

But the devil was not done. Now in windy conditions the base holder, secured with three screws to a wooden upright, started to pull the screws out of the wood. So those three were replaced with longer and beefier alternatives and so far, so good. I now have a new appreciation for the term ‘wind power’. And, just for grins, I riveted the two section flagpole together as it had a tendency to separate, yet again landing OG in the bushes. So there!

One final step was called for and that was to spray paint the bar stock red. That would make it virtually disappear against the background of the red stripe and also protect against rust. And here is the happy result:


Old Glory at rest.
Triple cable ties for safety.

A tribute, enjoyed daily, to the once and future greatest nation there has ever been. Meanwhile, we have a convicted felon destroying the economy and kowtowing to our foes, an ex (?) heroin junkie masquerading as Health Secretary, and a billionaire zonker and manic humper destroying the tendrils of our government. What could possibly go wrong?

6 months with the Mac Mini M4

Hardware, Mac Mini M4, Macintosh

A solid machine.


Still tiny.

I paid $799 for my 16gB/512gB Mac Mini M4 six months ago. B&H currently lists it for $744, at which price it’s a great bargain.

I have had no issues, except that I had to upgrade some applications, most importantly Lightroom Classic with its execrable subscription pricing. Still, at $10 monthly with many enhancements since my ancient version 6 running on the Mac Pro it’s not that bad a deal, but I do not like paying ransom money to a huge corporation. I also had to purchase an external enclosure for the four large hard disk drives and for the BluRay reader/burner which were formerly housed in the chassis of the magnificent Mac Pro. Sadly the latter had to be taken to the recyclers, despite being in perfect condition. A sad event.

Complaints? Screenshots take a few seconds to hit the desktop and sometimes they do not arrive at all. Not that big a deal. And rendering of 20-30mB DNG/RAW image files in LRc (from the Leica M10 and Nikon D800, respectively) can take some three seconds whereas the huge 80gB of RAM in the Mac Pro saw this happen immediately. Again, not a deal killer. And despite having only 16gB of RAM I cannot complain about performance which, in most respects, is of similar speed to that of the 2010 Mac Pro predecessor. And LRc loads in 4 seconds compared with 25 seconds in the old Mac Pro which is excellent, especially given my daily use of the application. Given three daily uses that’s a saving of over 6 hours a year.

Though there are 5 USB-C connectors (three of those also support Thunderbolt) I had to buy adapters for all my hard wired USB-A devices – keyboard, mouse, BluRay drive, laser printer, ink jet printer and a spare for a removable SDHC/CF camera card reader or an off site back-up hard drive. That’s six connections so in addition to buying USB-C to USB-A adapters, I also had to buy a splitter cord. All inexpensive.

The Mini continues to reside behind the keyboard on a pull out tray where it is not particularly well ventilated, but rarely gets even warm to the touch. I never hear the fan despite the Mini being some 14″ from my ears.


Nestled at the back of the keyboard tray. Open USB-A
connector is mostly used for reading camera cards.

If the Mini fails there’s nothing that can be easily fixed unlike in the Mac Pro which was an assemblage of replaceable hardware components. But there are no reports of poor reliability so far. And I console myself that the frequent software security updates from Apple keep the bad guys at bay. Yeah, right.

Recommended, as long as you avoid Apple’s gouging for higher RAM/SSD versions where the cost quickly goes ballistic.