The Panasonic NCR18500 is a lithium-ion cell intended for use in 18500 battery packs. It can power a wide range of devices, but in the drone world, 18500 batteries power the new Frsky X-Lite Radio.
These genuine Panasonic batteries are highly regarded for performance and safety.
If you're buying these for use in the Immersionrc Powerplay, they definitely work much better than the cells that come with it. They shouldn't have bothered to include the ones that come with the Powerplay because they're about as useful as the sample filament that comes with a 3D printer. Just enough to show you how nice it would be if you had the supplies you need. To avoid problems, I use an external charger. Often chargers for 18650 cells such as used for vaping, can also charge these little 18500 cells just FYI, so some of you may have a compatible external charger already. The charger on my powerplay doesn't appear to balance charge the cells, and in my case resulted in one battery at 4.3V and the other around 3.85. So one slightly overcharged and the other not far from what's "resting state" for these batteries. No Bueno! No wonder the Powerplay went into a brief fit of beeping followed by powering itself off seconds later, not more than about 7 minutes of being powerrdGood thing that didn't happen while doing anything that would turn video loss into a disaster, but that's why we test our stuff before trusting it.
As far as these 18500s I received, the 2040mAh feels like a tremendous improvement for my application, as it should having replaced measly little 1400mAh, but the improvement feels like more than an additional 640mAh. Particularly obvious when on startup of my powerplay and goggle combo the battery maintains a reading of 100% for quite a few two, three, 5 minute flights, where with the factory batteries the battery indicator would start dropping almost immediately. I'm more familiar with the larger 18650 batteries and am no particular fan of that size, but I have to admit that with absolutely no hard data to provide to back it up I think they're pretty impressive for their measly little size, but then that's the primary advantage of this type of hard case battery. Whatever your intended use is, I was told by someone "in the know", that in-device charging should be considered suspect unless you can establish that it properly balances multiple cells. If the inbuilt charger just charges multiple cells as one, differences in the batteries due to manufacturing tolerances or possibly bad QA can apparently cause the wide gap in charge levels I saw.
Akash A.
Works just fine for the X-Lite Control.
Byron J.
Exactly what was needed at the best price
Cameron H.
Battery works but it took a long time to get.
Anton K.
If you're buying these for use in the Immersionrc Powerplay, they definitely work much better than the cells that come with it. They shouldn't have bothered to include the ones that come with the Powerplay because they're about as useful as the sample filament that comes with a 3D printer. Just enough to show you how nice it would be if you had the supplies you need. To avoid problems, I use an external charger. Often chargers for 18650 cells such as used for vaping, can also charge these little 18500 cells just FYI, so some of you may have a compatible external charger already. The charger on my powerplay doesn't appear to balance charge the cells, and in my case resulted in one battery at 4.3V and the other around 3.85. So one slightly overcharged and the other not far from what's "resting state" for these batteries. No Bueno! No wonder the Powerplay went into a brief fit of beeping followed by powering itself off seconds later, not more than about 7 minutes of being powerrdGood thing that didn't happen while doing anything that would turn video loss into a disaster, but that's why we test our stuff before trusting it.
As far as these 18500s I received, the 2040mAh feels like a tremendous improvement for my application, as it should having replaced measly little 1400mAh, but the improvement feels like more than an additional 640mAh. Particularly obvious when on startup of my powerplay and goggle combo the battery maintains a reading of 100% for quite a few two, three, 5 minute flights, where with the factory batteries the battery indicator would start dropping almost immediately. I'm more familiar with the larger 18650 batteries and am no particular fan of that size, but I have to admit that with absolutely no hard data to provide to back it up I think they're pretty impressive for their measly little size, but then that's the primary advantage of this type of hard case battery. Whatever your intended use is, I was told by someone "in the know", that in-device charging should be considered suspect unless you can establish that it properly balances multiple cells. If the inbuilt charger just charges multiple cells as one, differences in the batteries due to manufacturing tolerances or possibly bad QA can apparently cause the wide gap in charge levels I saw.
