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We test five of the best
 Who needs an accessory battery pack? The traditional answer: anyone who has to make multiple flash pictures in rapid succession, and who needs major-league flash capacity. (Wedding photographers immediately come to mind.) Recently, though, there’s a new reason to consider a battery pack: With the right cable, it can juice your power-starved DSLR, too.
Caution: Before investing in a portable power source, be aware that using one may jeopardize your flash and/or DSLR warranty. Also, can you deal with the extra gear? Some photographers can handle the battery itself; it’s the cable(s) they find entangling.
Not long ago, a common complaint about NiCd rechargeable power packs was that they developed “memory” problems that could prevent full charging. That’s no longer an issue, however, especially with these industrial-grade cells.
Of all the battery-pack stats worth comparing, the most telling is flash capacity. The power demands of a DSLR are minimal compared with those of your flash. To determine the number of pops per charge, we put each through four charge/discharge conditioning cycles, using full-power pops from a Vivitar 285 HV. We then ran two to four test cycles (with 60 seconds between pops) to collect the data for the charts that follow.
Packs with punch: All the battery packs we tested will power flash units as well as digital SLRs. All connect with similar cables to flashes or cameras. Clockwise from left: Sunpak TR-2000, Quantum Turbo 2x2, Lumedyne UltraCycler, Quantum Turbo Compact, and Lumedyne MicroCycler.
Download our Flash Battery Packs Full Test Results
-requires Adobe Acrobat Reader
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