How to Charge a Camera Battery from USB
Charging a digital camera, even professional level DSLRs, when you’re not near an outlet is surprisingly easy and fast. Follow our guide below to learn how to efficiently charge your digital camera battery from USB and get shooting.
Step 1: Find Your Camera Battery Model Number
Remove the battery from your digital camera and located the model number. The image below shows that this Canon battery is a LP-E8 model (circled in the red).
Step 2: Find the Matching USB Camera Cradle
Head over to our USB camera adapters section and look up your cradle by brand. If you don’t see your camera battery model listed, contact our team and we’ll be happy to help you find the one you need.
Step 3: Connect Camera Cradle to Battery Pack or Solar Panel
You can use any USB battery pack to charge the camera cradles above. These are also compatible with solar panels that have a built-in USB output like our Arc 10W Solar Charger. Voltaic battery packs are optimized to charge efficiently from solar and charge and discharge at the same time. We recommend charging from the 2 Amp USB port on our V44 USB Battery or our V88 Laptop Battery when charging batteries multiple times.
How Well Does Charging Cameras from USB Work?
When using the 2A output, we can charge camera batteries quickly, but not quite as fast as from the wall. The output on our adapters is 800mA vs 1.2A on the Canon charger for the LP-E6 (our most popular selling charger). So we’re charging 2/3rds as fast as you would at home.
Note, some USB camera adapters available on Amazon output 400mA. These adapters will charge the camera batteries half as fast.
Wait, I Thought Camera Batteries Had Higher Voltage Than USB
It is true. Most camera batteries in DSLR and full frame mirrorless cameras are 7.4V and USB is only 5V. To charge the battery, the camera adapter boosts the voltage from 5 to 8.4. At that higher voltage, the USB cradle is able to charge the 7.4 Volt camera battery.
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