Wasabi Power USB Battery (Ginger Series) for Olympus BLX-1 and Olympus OM System OM-1 / OM-1 Mark ii

This battery price is higher than the original battery of the BLX-1. go for the original in the same price range.

Most of the time I buy the OEM batteries for expensive cameras. Big advantage of this unit is the built in USB-C port. It adds so much flexibility for power in the field. So far it seems to last quite a while and you can use a charger or just a USB-C plug to charge. Really nice always having a fresh batter to deploy. Very happy.

OM System doesn’t include a battery charger for the OM3 so you have to charge in body via usb c. Since most people have a spare usb c cable around, it’s really nice to have a spare battery that can be charged out of the body, take up no more space than the battery itself and seems to work just fine. Highly recommend getting this as a spare.

Cost effective for a backup. Does not last as long as OEM (maybe 80%) and battery shot count does not always reset.

First up, simple in-camera capacity testing resulted in about 90% the capacity of genuine BLX-1 batteries. This battery averaged 228 shots per charge while the genuine BLX-1 averaged 250. Testing methodology here was with an OM-1 and 100-400mm lens set to take 1 picture per minute. Perfectly acceptable capacity. What attracted me to this offering was the standalone USB-C charging. In part due to the convenience, but primarily due to the associated charging circuitry. The typical flaw with third party camera batteries is that they have no circuitry to balance the two battery cells inside - it's usually just a 'dumb' charging circuit because of the proprietary nature of camera batteries. By comparison USB-C charging circuits are a commodity item, and while I'm not going to open it up to confirm such is the case I'd be quite surprised if it wasn't using a properly designed USB-C charging circuit that balances the two cells while charging.

So nice to be able to charge using USB-C. Works fine in my OM-1 Mark II. I cannot compare to the original relating to number of photos but for the convenience I don't care. I will purchase a second otherwise I still need a charger to recharge my original battery.