Price: £40
Website: www.digipowersolutions.com
If you like to travel light and are fed up carrying numerous chargers and cables to recharge your camera, phone, tablet and other portable devices, a universal battery charger can be an extremely useful accessory.
The DigiPower Smart Battery Charger TC-5000U is a slightly different take on the type of universal battery charger we’ve seen before and, rather than having to slide and adjust a pair of prongs to align with the battery contacts, the TC-5000U features a clever arrangement of prongs that are designed to automatically make contact with a battery’s terminals when it is inserted.
The idea eliminates the usual hassle of having to set up a universal charger and it worked a treat with the NP-95 battery out of our Fujifilm X100T, recognising it instantaneously.
For batteries that have small and difficult-to-access contacts, DigiPower provides a selection of charging plates to help initiate a perfect connection. Plates are provided for Sony (NP-FW50, NP-FV50), Canon (LP-E6, LP-E8) and Nikon (EN-EL14, EN-EL15) batteries, and these simply slot into the charger before the battery is clamped into place using the sprung retention bar.
This array of prongs allows the charger to work with almost any battery.
Suitable for recharging Li-ion batteries with voltages ranging from 3.6V-8.4V, the charger displays a constant red LED when it’s charging, which turns to green when a battery is fully charged. Another useful feature is the USB port at the side, which allows a Li-ion battery and USB device to be charged simultaneously.
However, unlike Ansmann’s Powerline Vario universal charger, there’s no Micro USB input, so it’s not possible to hook it up to a powered USB socket or a portable power bank. The build quality is plasticky, but for those who want to save space and carry a single charger that’s capable of charging many different types of camera batteries and mobile devices, it ticks the right boxes and performs well. Michael Topham
