In this office, there are several Canon cameras. Because all of these cameras are from the same company, and were roughly equivalent in their position in the Canon model range, you would expect some cross-compatibility. There is some, of course. The lenses can be freely swapped between all of them, and can even be swapped with models from way back when such cameras still used film. However, every single camera in this office uses a different battery.
This is not a new problem.
As regular readers might know, I have begun collecting old cameras, possibly because I am allergic to money. Old cameras mostly used mercury-based batteries, because they provided consistent voltage and were relatively small, a good combination for the low demands that the camera placed on them. That meant that they could save money on circuitry for the light meter, which was great. That also meant that the batteries were filled with mercury, which was not.
Realizing that a landfill with mercury in it was a terrible idea, mercury batteries were eventually outlawed. The solution camera manufacturers came up with to cope with the fact that none of their old cameras could work anymore was great, for them, because they mostly just encouraged everyone to buy a new camera.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I suspect that the ban on mercury batteries is a big part of the current battery chaos that afflicts Canon. They realized that a scarcity of batteries was a great way to push people to move into something new. After all, if a battery goes in an otherwise perfectly good digital SLR camera, it’s going to be useless – unlike old cameras, you can’t go battery-free, digital requires electricity while film does not. The great solution, for Canon, is to just get people to switch to a new one. The newer model is better anyway, and the batteries do last a very long time, so it’s another reason to make an inevitable upgrade. It’s a clever use of planned obsolescence, upgrades are encouraged just by making sure a single essential component is hard to find.
In the case of an old camera, it’s possible to get a battery, provided you exercise a bit of creativity. My Canonet 28, along with many other cameras of the era, can function with a hearing aid battery wrapped in a rubber O-ring to make it big enough to stay in place. It’s an unexpected solution, but one that works.
The battery shapes in modern cameras, however, are so different all of the O-rings in the world aren’t going to fix the problem. Every digital SLR you see is going to be completely useless in 40 years, even as their purely mechanical grandparents still work. And before you say that nobody will want to use them in 40 years, camera collecting fools like myself are evidence that might not be the case - people thought nobody would care about film in 2017, and look at me now, putting O-rings on hearing aid batteries and trying to bring these old things back to life.
My grandmother could give me her film camera and it is still usable, if possibly less than convenient. My digital camera might make infinitely better images, but I know that if I have grandchildren, they’re not going to be able to use it, because there is no way that they will find a replacement battery.
