Choosing the Right Battery for Your Sony a6000

If you’re looking for spare batteries for the Sony a6000 camera, or to replace the battery it came with, here’s a rundown of good options.

The a6000 uses the NP-FW50, a battery Sony shared across a lot of its cameras of that era. If you have other Sony bodies and want to know which batteries fit which, my Sony camera battery compatibility guide covers the whole lineup.

Basically, there are two ways you can go: get the Sony-branded version or go with an aftermarket version from a third-party manufacturer. Each path has pros and cons.

Sony a6000 battery: Sony original

Firstly, you can get the Sony-branded battery. It’s the one that Sony recommends (obviously) and supports. So this is the safest option. The upside is that you know it will work, and if it doesn’t, you have access to Sony customer support.

To cut to the chase, the model number is NP-FW50.¹ It’s a 1020mAh rechargeable lithium-ion battery.

There is a downside with these Sony-branded ones, and that is their premium pricing. The original manufacturers typically charge more for their accessories; that includes batteries. That’s very much true in this case — Sony’s list price for these is $79.99, although you can often find them for substantially less than that.

So, in short, going with the Sony-branded version is the safest option, but you pay a premium for that peace of mind that the quality will be up to snuff.

You can find them at: Amazon and B&H Photo.

Sony a6000 batteries: Aftermarket options

These days you can also find very good after-market versions that are made by third-party manufacturers.

There are two reasons to go down this path. Firstly, price. These third-party manufacturers often price their products at a fraction of the original manufacturer. So you might find that you can get two or three or more of these batteries for the price of one battery from the original manufacturer.

There’s a second plus: you often have more options available. It’s not so much the battery itself — they’re all fundamentally the same (although some are rated for a slightly higher capacity). It has more to do with chargers. Sony does make a separate charger for these batteries — the BC-TRW — but it doesn’t come with the a6000, which is set up to charge the battery in the camera via the USB cable. So you can charge one battery at a time, and you can’t really use your camera while you’re charging.² But several of the aftermarket options include a separate cradle charger, meaning you can use that to charge the batteries while you’re still shooting with the one in the camera, and some allow you to charge multiple batteries at once.

There are also good reasons you might not want to go down the path of using an aftermarket battery. For one, you don’t have the same peace of mind that the quality is as good as the Sony-branded batteries. It might be, and in my experience, the better aftermarket brands often perform just as well as the original manufacturer’s batteries, but there’s also more risk that it might not be. I’ve found that some of them are basically indistinguishable in terms of quality, but I’ve also come across some that are substandard.

There’s one difference that isn’t about build quality. The NP-FW50 is one of Sony’s InfoLITHIUM batteries, which means the camera reads capacity data from the battery itself to show a remaining percentage. Third-party cells don’t always report that data as accurately, so the percentage on screen can be less trustworthy than it is with a genuine battery, and some Sony bodies will throw up an “InfoLITHIUM battery only” style message. Sony’s own position is that it doesn’t support or guarantee operation with non-Sony batteries.

Some of the better aftermarket brands, like Wasabi Power, Smatree, Powerextra, and Watson have established a solid reputation. There are other brands you’ve probably never heard of. For another, it is possible for the camera manufacturer to enforce certain batteries through firmware. For now, Sony isn’t doing this, but it remains within its capability to sneak this in with a future firmware upgrade.

How to charge the Sony a6000 battery

The basic way to charge the battery is to leave it in the camera and connect the camera to a power source via the USB cable. The camera comes with a cable and an AC wall charger for this very purpose. This approach is simple, and the necessary parts are supplied. You could also use an external USB power brick or a standard USB car charger.

There are two downsides to it, though. Firstly, it’s slow. You can expect a healthy, fully depleted battery to fully charge in a little over 5 hours. Secondly, it really limits your ability to shoot while the battery is charging. While you can shoot with the camera connected to an external power source — something that’s very useful in studio environments or for long-duration capture, it’s cumbersome to have the camera tethered to an external power source for everyday shooting.

Another approach is to use a separate cradle charger. With these, you remove the battery from the camera and place it directly in the charger. Some, but not all of these are quicker to charge. And it’s convenient to be able to charge spares while leaving the camera available to use.

Sony’s own external charger for these batteries is the BC-TRW, sold separately rather than in the box. Most of the third-party options bundle a charger with one or two batteries, which is usually the simpler way to get both at once.

How long does the Sony a6000 battery last?

Sony rates the a6000 at about 360 shots using the rear screen and about 310 shots through the viewfinder. These are the figures Sony provides for guidance in the instruction manual.

They’re very much approximations. That’s because there’s a variety of factors that can influence battery life, such as the health and charge status of the battery to the air temperature (lithium batteries don’t perform well in very hot or very cold temperatures). And as you can see from the table, you’ll get different results depending on whether you’re using the back screen or the viewfinder because they draw different amounts of power. How much you’re using autofocus, zoom, and optical image stabilization are also factors.

Sony a6000 Shooting Mode		Battery Life	Number of Images
Shooting Photos	Screen	180 mins	360
	Viewfinder	155	310
Start-stop Video Recording	Screen	60	–
	Viewfinder	60	–
Continuous Video Recording	Screen	90	–
	Viewfinder	90	–
Viewing Photos		275 mins	5500

Notes & References:

1. There’s also a Sony battery with model number NP-FV50. For the a6000, you want the one with the “W” not the “V”. [↩︎]
2. Technically, you can shoot with the camera connected to an external power source, but it’s not a very practical option for everyday shooting because it involves the extra moving part of an external power source, whether a USB power brick or an AC charger. [↩︎]