Author: batteryforpc

GoPro’s dominance has shifted slightly in recent years but when it comes to dedicated action cams with incredible stabilization, it’s hard to beat. That performance comes at a price, however, so what do you get when you buy yourself a budget option?

In this excellent video, Gene Nagata a.k.a. Potato Jet puts the AKASO V50 Pro Native 4K30fps 20MP WiFi Action Camera with EIS Touch Screen to the test, pitting it against the GoPro Hero 8 Black. The AKASO is one-third of the price of the GoPro and the box includes a watch that enables remote control, along with a spare battery and charger — all items that are missing from the basic GoPro Hero 8 option. At just $120, it’s something of a bargain.

Nagata runs through a load of comparisons and while video quality and stabilization is definitely not on par with the GoPro, much of the AKASO’s limitations seem to be about usability and durability. As with most camera gear, you will get what you pay for.

Notably, if you opt for the AKASO, you’re investing in technology from a company that has no proven record. There may be a warranty but making the claim might be tricky, and once outside of that first year of use, it’s hard to know how long the camera will hold up. Of course, at that price point, it’s much more replaceable, so it probably balances out.

Have you bought a cheap action cam? Are there any models that stand out above the rest? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

UK-based LEE Filters has released a brand new filter system that was designed to work best with smaller mirrorless cameras like Fuji’s X-series. The LEE85 System aims to give mirrorless APS-C shooters a more portable and size-appropriate option, without skimping on features.

“The LEE85 Filter System has been engineered specifically for photographers with smaller bodied cameras and lenses who need to travel light but don’t want to compromise on filter quality and versatility,” reads the description on LEE’s website. “[It’s] both compact and easy-to-use. It’s perfect for any kind of photography on-the-go, especially handheld.”

The holder itself is similar to the company’s LEE100 system, allowing you to slot in up to 3 filters (including the circular polarizer) and featuring a locking dial that allows you to adjust the holder’s orientation on the adapter ring before locking it down completely while you shoot.

The System will be sold in various kits with three different adapter rings—58mm, 67mm and 72mmm—and a set of corresponding filters that were designed for smaller sensors and the smaller holder.

In the illustration below, you can see how a LEE100 Hard Grad (left) needs to be substituted for a LEE100 Very Hard Grad (right) to get the same effect on a crop-sensor camera body. In addition to being more portable and convenient for smaller sized cameras, the LEE85 Hard Grad’s transition is already adjusted for the smaller image sensor.

The LEE85 System is due out in Q2 of 2020, assuming no pandemic-caused delays. For now, there’s no official release date or price associated with the system and its various kits.

Laptops have become more essential than ever for remote access to work, school, and web-based apps. Maximizing battery life becomes an even greater priority to make sure we remain connected to the rest of the world without interruption. These dozen laptops can keep you online and working longer when you need to be unplugged.

A laptop with good battery life used to be mean a skinny, under-powered notebook that sacrificed performance to squeeze every extra minute out of a charge. Obviously the more powerful a system is, the more power it draws, and the less time a battery can handle supplying that power. 

But research into extending battery life — not to mention work from processor manufacturers — has yielded huge dividends over recent years, and while the super-svelte portables and the laptops designed for basic productivity tasks (think Chromebooks) still provide the most time between charges, there are far more systems that boast solid battery life without sacrificing nearly as much performance as they once did.

Because impressive battery life can be found in pretty much every category of laptops these days, we’re here to help you figure out which ones actually provide the best battery life for different laptop types, from Chromebooks to 2-in-1 hybrids to even gaming laptops. Check out a dozen of our picks for laptops with the longest battery life below. 

Disclosure: ZDNet may earn an affiliate commission from some of the products featured on this page. ZDNet and the author were not compensated for this independent review.

Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1

A business convertible laptop with a number of features — and a price tag to match — the Latitude 7400’s most impressive spec has to be its battery life. While laptop review sites have varying methods of battery testing, top reviewers are getting at least 13 hours of juice from the system.

Though its eighth-generation Core processors options aren’t Intel’s latest, they’re still powerful Core i5 and i7 options. Step up from the base configuration, and you get 8GB or 16GB of RAM, 256GB or 512GB solid-state storage, a full 1,920×1,080 14-inch display, and a larger 60Whr battery that can maximizes battery life. Regardless of configuration, once you do reach the end of your charge, Dell claims the ExpressCharge feature provides an 80% recharge in a just an hour.

Acer Aspire 5

In a world of snazzy luxe notebooks and dirt-cheap laptops, it’s hard for a solid mainstream laptop to stand out. But that shouldn’t stop you from looking past Acer’s Aspire family, which offers all-around quality at a reasonable price While the Aspire 5 won’t stand out in most areas, long battery life is its calling card. In its review of the Aspire 5, our sister site CNET got over 8.5 hours of juice from its battery. 

That finding is close to the 9 hours Acer claims for the Aspire 5, and is noticeably higher than most sub-$500 laptops provide. You also get decent performance from Intel Core and AMD Ryzen processors, and Acer even throws in a full HD 15.6-inch screen to boot.

Acer Swift 1

Need a little more battery life and don’t mind a bit less performance than the Aspire 5? Acer has you covered with the Swift 1, a 2020 version of what we used to think of as the type of laptop that would sport good battery life: It’s pretty cheap and small, and won’t be confused with a $2,000 gaming laptop in the performance realm.

Nonetheless, the Swift 1 is more than competent for basic tasks, which you can perform all day thanks to its battery life. CNET’s testing found that the laptop provided more than 9 hours of life between charges, close to the 10 hours that Acer claims for the Swift 1. It manages to hit that figure by using lower performance, but more efficient Intel Pentium and Celeron processors, though Acer does throw in a full HD 14-inch display even on the base configuration. 

Apple MacBook Pro

Just from its name along, the MacBook Air should have the best battery life of Apple’s laptops, right? Not anymore, as the latest MacBook Pro models have surpassed the svelte Air. One advantage of the MacBook Pro’s bigger size is that Apple can squeeze a bigger battery within it, and in the case of the 16-inch version, it’s much bigger: 100Whr compared to the 58Whr of the 13-inch edition. 

While you’re supposed to get an extra hour of battery life from the bigger MacBook Pro, it also has more room for top-notch components that can quickly erase that advantage. If you want a more consistent 10 hours of battery life, the smaller MacBook Pro might be the ticket if you’re set on an Apple laptop with the top battery life. 

Asus ExpertBook B9450

Asus isn’t the first name when you think of business laptops, but that might change with the ExpertBook B9450, which weights a mere 1.9 pounds and promises up to an astounding 24 hours of battery when it launches in the coming weeks.

To go up against the likes of the Lenovo ThinkPads of the world, a full day’s battery life definitely helps, as does its meeting of MIL-STD 810G durability standards. Other cool features include a LED number pad that’s built into the trackpad area of the keyboard and, like the Dell Latitiude 7400, a quick-charging mode that recharges the battery up to 60 percent in just 40 minutes. Designed around the principles of Intel’s Project Athena initiative, the ExpertBook B9450’s combination of top battery life and design savvy could make it a business laptop worth considering compared to the more traditional players in the market.

Google PixelBook Go

Google rolled out the Chromebook concept years ago around a cheap laptop with minimal specs that could offer excellent battery life using the efficient Chrome OS and cloud-based apps. While it’s succeeded wildly with that concept, its own forays into Chromebook systems has taken a different tact, emphasizing higher specs and a higher price tag.

Its Pixelbook Go costs more than many mainstream Windows laptops, thanks to specs like Intel Core processors, superior keyboard and a full HD 13.3-inch touchscreen display. It’s also one of the increasing number of Chromebooks that offers Google Play store integration for access to Android apps. In terms of battery hours, Google claims 12 hours between charges, butZDNet’s own Matthew Miller says he’s been getting closer to 10 hours. He’s also been using it as his daily laptop, which should say something about the effectiveness of Google’s approach.

HP Spectre x360

HP really stepped it up with the latest version of its ultraportable business 2-in-1, which gets a processor boost, receives some significant cosmetic surgery, and still retains superior battery life.

Specifically, the newest Spectre x360 leaps from 8th-generation to 10th-gen Intel Core CPU options, significantly improving its performance. It also loses a lot of unnecessary bezel space, making it 13 percent smaller than it previously was. Even with those changes, the Spectre x360 still provided 10.5 hours of battery life in CNET’s testing, part of the reason it earned our sister site’s Editors’ Choice award.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon

The ExpertBook B9450 is designed to compete against the likes of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, one of the leading ultraportable business laptops. It’s a tall order, as the ThinkPad is a staple of the corporate world, and Lenovo doesn’t rest on its laurels with the X1 Carbon, including solid battery life. 

There’s one important caveat to its battery duration, however: If you opt for the 4K display with 500 nits of brightness, battery life plunges. If you can live with the 1080p display for superior battery performance, you still get a 2.4 pound system with a carbon-fiber chassis that has passed a dozen different MIL-STD-810G durability tests. 

LG Gram 17

As with gaming laptops, desktop replacement notebooks with large displays are notoriously power hogs, making “battery life” seem like a bit of an oxymoron. But that was before the likes of the 17-inch version of the LG Gram hit the scene.

It might be built around a 17-inch 2,560×1600 display, yet this Gram manages to weigh less than 3 pounds. That svelteness, along with eschewing the discrete graphics that many desktop replacements offer, helps allow it to eek out some phenomenal battery life — over 12 hours inCNET’s testing. And that was before LG updated the Gram lineup for 2020 and increased the size of the battery in its largest laptop from 72Whr to 80Whr.

Microsoft Surface Book 2

If anyone knows how to claw the most battery life out of Windows, it should be Microsoft, so it should come as no surprise that two of its Surface devices appear in our roundup. While the world waits for a possible Surface Book 3, it still has the Surface Book 2 to handle productivity duties.

Despite being bigger than the original Surface Book (sporting a 15-inch screen compared to the original’s 13.5-inch display), the sequel manages to provide well over 10 hours of battery life. That’s even when equipped with a Core i7 CPU and GeForce GTX 1060 discrete graphics, as ZDNet’s own Ed Bott found when testing out the Surface Book 2. It owes its fantastic battery life to a jumbo-sized 102 Whr battery, which can also quickly recharge the laptop in relatively little time.

Microsoft Surface Pro X

Whereas the Surface Book 2 looks to serve as a desktop replacement, the Surface Pro X looks to serve as a very portable traveling companion. Microsoft’s thinnest, lightest Surface device, the Pro X is also one of the few Windows systems using an ARM processor rather than one from AMD or Intel.

You should expect about a dozen hours of battery life from the Pro X, even with a very high-res 2,880×1,920 13-inch display. In our review, the ARM chip managed better performance than you might expect from technology best known for powering smartphones, but the newest Qualcomm SQ1 processor trounced the previous Snapdragon chip that HP used in its Envy x2. There are a couple of disadvantages to the Surface Pro X — namely, full ARM compatibility with Windows apps is still developing, and the starting price does not include a digital pen or keyboard to turn this into a full convertible device. But battery life definitely isn’t one of them. 

MSI GS65 Stealth

In 2020, there can even be a winner for best battery life for a gaming laptop, as component makers have squeezed more power out of tinier processors and graphics cards. The current holder of the title is the MSI GS65 Stealth, which comes in at a little over 4 pounds despite packing a six-core Intel Core i7-8750H CPU and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 or 1070 discrete graphics card.

While being just 0.7 inches thick, the GS65 Stealth manages to smush in an 80 Whr battery, which provides several hours of power away from an outlet. Although 6 or 7 hours can’t compare to the other models in this roundup, that’s much better than the 2 or 3 hours many gaming laptops offer. As a result, an otherwise very good midrange gaming notebook becomes a great choice compared to more power-hungry rivals.

Samsung Chromebook 4

Unlike the Pixelbook Go, Samsung’s latest Chromebook is based on the original concept: Low power, low cost. The 11.6-inch Chromebook 4 starts well under $300, in large part due to components like Intel’s Celeron N4000 processor, just 32GB of onboard storage, and a run-of-the-mill 1,366×768 screen.

While that might not be cause for much excitement, its battery life should be — Samsung claims 12.5 hours, and though Laptop Mag only got about 10.5 hours in its review, that still was an hour longer than the average Chromebook it’s tested. Samsung has also upped the design quality compared to similarly priced Chromebooks, with an aluminum top and durability features that allow it to pass a number of MIL-STD 810G tests. Better still, you move up to a Chromebook 4+ with a 15.6-inch display (albeit with less battery life) and still only pay around $300.

The upcoming Kirin 820 will be the first 5G-connected chipset from Huawei aimed at the mid-range. Leakster Digital Chat Station has provided the first unofficial details about the hardware.

This will be a 7nm chip with Cortex-A76 acting as the big cores, just like in the Kirin 810 and 990 4G. The ISP and NPU are “fully upgraded”, presumably compared to the 810.

Interestingly, this will be the first chipset to come out of the HiSilicon foundries to use the Mali-G77 GPU (even the Kirin 990 uses G76). According to ARM, the G77 is 120% to 140% faster per mm² compared to the G76, it’s 30% more energy efficient as well.

The Mali-G77 is also used in Samsung’s Exynos 990 chipset found in some Galaxy S20 versions. Of course, Huawei probably won’t configure the mid-range chip with 11 cores, but the GPU will still be miles ahead of the Mali-G52 found inside the Kirin 810.

This chipset will be used in the Honor 30S, more models are probably on the way too.

It’s easy to understand why a memory kit with four-times the capacity costs four times as much, but those of us accustomed to pricing out 16GB kits still face sticker shock at the thought of paying $299 for two DIMMs. But a look around at various competitors’ kits shows that this is, indeed, a value price.

We’re not implying that there aren’t cheaper kits at this capacity, but most of those have a lower data rate that doesn’t appeal to performance enthusiasts. The DDR4-3200 rating of WarHawk RGB (part number MD4U323216DEDA) puts it right in the middle of that segment, and OLOy supplements this performance with a CAS 16 rating which likewise hits the middle at one latency cycle per 100 MHz frequency (200 MHz data rate).

That doesn’t mean that this is the perfect 64GB dual-channel kit, however, as its tRCD and tRP are programmed to 20 cycles for its 1.35V XMP (Intel Extreme Memory Profile). This is the same minor setback we saw with Corsair’s competing Vengeance RGB Pro. And, like that competing product, the kit will revert to DDR4-2133 CAS 15 on any system that doesn’t have XMP enabled, doesn’t have XMP at all, or can’t support this kit’s XMP data rate.

Having seen how we peeled the heat spreader of its 32GB WarHawk kit to reveal SpecTek ICs, OLOy sent this 64GB kit with its IC logos completely scrubbed. The Micron-based programming remains however, and we believe that this larger kit also sources the same Micron daughter-brand.

Nothing has changed in WarHawk RGB program compatibility since we confirmed it last year, apart from minor interface updates to our motherboard’s software that makes it look better. OLOy doesn’t offer its own RGB suite.

Comparison Hardware

OLOy carries a similar lifetime warranty to its competitors, but the differences in how these modules are handled after the first three years might be unsettling to some buyers. We’re comforted in the knowledge that memory defects are usually revealed within the first three years, but usually doesn’t mean exclusively. The competing 2x32GB samples in today’s review come from Corsair and G.Skill, with the Trident Z Neo offering the advantage of slightly better timings (at a higher price).

In our test setup, AMD’s impressive Ryzen 7 3700X is controlled by MSI’s memory-mastering MEG X570 Ace and fed by Toshiba’s OCZ RD400 SSD, while Gigabyte’s GeForce RTX 2070 Gaming OC 8G pushes any gaming bottlenecks back towards the CPU and DRAM.

Overclocking and Latency Tuning

OLOy takes second place in overclocking in our testing, behind G.Skill, with none of these reaching even the now-common DDR4-4000 available from several kits of lower capacity. It looks like the 16Gb (sixteen gigabit) ICs required to build this capacity have a little catching up to do.

Lowest Stable Timings at 1.35V (Max) on MEG X570 ACE (BIOS 1.20)

Lower is better when it comes to latency: The WarHawk RGB’s slow tRCD and tRP were stable enough to let these DIMMs clock up to DDR4-3600 by increasing only tCAS, the first setting in the primary timings group. That puts the kit between the Corsair and G.Skill modules in tweakability for latency reduction.

The XMP profile of OLOy WarHawk RGB ties with that of the Vengeance RGB Pro in SiSoftware Sandra’s memory tests, but its better tweakability puts it between Corsair and G.Skill at our best-determined custom settings.

The OLOy WarHawk RGB kit beat the Vengeance RGB Pro in games, but only by a margin too slim for us to get excited about. Trident Z Neo’s better timings keep it on top throughout.

WarHawk RGB pulled off an unexpected XMP victory in our timed tests, but still fell behind Trident Z Neo when both were tuned to their lowest latency limit. It’s not that anyone would notice a four-second difference on a seven-minute benchmark, but a victory is a victory.

Final Thoughts

OLOy’s WarHawk RGB was at least 10% cheaper than the other DDR4-3200 kits in today’s comparison, leaving only the Vengeance LPX DDR4-3000 to undercut it on price. Yet with DDR4-3200 becoming the baseline performance standard for enthusiasts, DDR4-3000 would need to be far cheaper to get our attention.

The cost savings for the Corsair Vengeance kit is too small for us to consider reverting back to the slower speed, but that may not be true for everyone. Still, RGB value seekers who also happen to be performance enthusiasts are served better by the WarHawk RGB.