William P.N. Smith wrote in
:

Dave Fawthrop wrote:
Roy Lewallen wrote:
|You can be sure that if manufacturers were pressed to come up with a
|single number for alkaline cell capacity

|The resulting numbers
|would be totally useless.

Not IMI totally useless, just limited.

But limited to uselessness for most consumers. A single number won't
tell you if a particular battery is better suited for years of life in
a digital clock or more pictures in a digital camera. Batteries
optimized for one scenario would be awful in the other.


Since the early seventies, probably earlier, there were two kinds of
battery that a consumer would see for either a dry cell or an alkaline:
Long Life, and High Power. So if you use a single value for capacity per
battery type, and it is printed honstly on the appropriately named battery,
people will know that this figure applies if they use the battery
appropriately.

There are two points that could be confusing:

1. Mixing up the battery types.
2. Demands that are some way between both types.

There's not much you can do about the first, when people fail to understand
the difference, telling them more data won't help, but telling them less is
disrespectful.

The second case is the tougher one, and there the single value won't be
enough, but you can refer people to a makers graph of lifetime for average
current drawn per life, one graph per battery type (Both graphs printed on
cardboard packaging for both types). They can put both plots together and
make their own choice. The point where the plotted lines cross is the set
of conditions for which both batteries are equal to the task. This idea is
simple enough to grasp by intuition, and also highly informative if you
look at the values for capacity and drawn current.