Hähnel ProCube3 review: dedicated battery chargers for multiple makes of camera

Beautiful. Gorgeous. Exquisite. Sexy. These are words I’d never normally associate with a battery charger, but the ProCube3 is rather different. Let’s backtrack a bit to the ProCube2. This previous incarnation won a gold award from our review team, my colleague Hannah Rooke being completely won over. In some respects, the new ProCube3 is even better. Again it comes from hähnel, a company that’s certainly made its mark on the photographic industry over the last 66 years. Although founded in Germany, the company opened its research, development and production facility in Ireland back in 1975, which has grown steadily. Over the decades, hähnel has made some notable achievements and, to give context to the ProCube3, actually developed the world’s first plug-in charger for Li-ion camera batteries.

hähnel ProCube3: Specifications

hähnel ProCube3: Price

What price is a battery charger? You can get own-brand Li-ion battery chargers from respective camera manufacturers for around $50 / £50 and, indeed, you might need to. Increasingly, even up-market cameras these days tend to ship with no charger, relying on you to charge batteries in-camera via a USB-C cable. That has the obvious pitfall that you can’t charge spare batteries while you’re out and about with the camera itself. And even if you buy a separate charger from your camera manufacturer, they can typically only charge one battery at a time.

Another option is to dip your toe into the sea of independent chargers available from the likes of Amazon, with super-cheap prices that kick off from around $10 / £10. They often work well enough but tend to look and feel basic and cheaply made. With a list price of $TBA / £69.99, the ProCube3 is a little pricier than many own-brand chargers but looks a much more sophisticated affair, with top-notch build quality and fancy features. And it can charge two camera batteries simultaneously, for which you’d usually have to buy a pair of own-brand chargers. I reckon that makes it very good value at the price.

hähnel ProCube3: Design & Handling

Like the ProCube2, the replacement ProCube3 is available in many flavors, or at least colors. Each caters to a specific brand of camera, the current range including Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, Olympus, Sony and Fujifilm. I tested the Nikon version which, along with the Canon ‘red’ edition, gets a color change to what hähnel calls yellow. I’d call it gold, matching the standard I’d award to some of my all-time favorite cameras, including the Nikon Z 6II and Nikon Z fc. Like others in the range, the Nikon edition comes with multiple, interchangeable baseplates, so it can host different batteries within the camera maker’s range. In this case, there are three baseplates included, for slotting in one or two EN-EL14, EN-EL15 or EN-EL25 series batteries. But don’t let me get ahead of myself.

The smart looking retail box for the Nikon edition contains the ‘cube’ itself, plus three interchangeable 2-slot camera battery baseplates, a further 4-slot AA battery plate and a 1.5m USB-C fast-charging cable. You also get two ‘keys’ for swapping the baseplates but more on that later. Unlike the preceding ProCube2, there’s no mains adapter nor a 12v car socket. Keeping up with the times, it’s USB-C all the way, so you can use whatever mains adapter, car socket or power bank that you have to hand. A 30W supply is recommended but the ProCube3 also works with lower-wattage supplies, with the proviso that charging can take rather longer.

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Here’s the baseplate for Nikon EN-EL25 and equivalent batteries like those shown here from Hahnel.

Each alternative baseplate clips into the ProCube3 and can charge either one or two batteries.

Each baseplate has its own circuitry and a full set of gold-plated electronic contacts.

Here’s how the base section looks with no plates fitted. You’ll notice the gold-plated pins that connect to the contacts on the bottom of each baseplate.

Not just a power-hungry charger, the ProCube3 gives as good as it gets. Around the back there’s a USB-A port that can pump out up to 2 amps for charging additional devices like mobile phones and other gadgets that need a boost, spreading the love and the usefulness. The following gallery of four images shows how the baseplates work.

The three Li-ion battery plates in my Nikon version slot into the base unit with a resounding click from the internal clip fastener. This ensures that there’s enough force applied to the spring-loaded pins that supply electronic contact to the baseplates. It’s perhaps a little frustrating that you need to use a small key, a bit like the reset key supplied with many gadgets, to release the clip and change baseplates. By contrast, magnetic attraction is used for the 4-slot AA battery plate, which doesn’t make use of the clip-in mechanism. As such, the flat AA plate can fit over the top of any of the baseplates for Li-ion batteries, so you don’t need to remove a baseplate if you want to charge AA batteries – just stick it on the top.

There’s another sticking point here though, so to speak, in that the AA charger isn’t an independent channel example of the breed. In my tests, I couldn’t get a single or even a pair of AA batteries to charge on their own. Instead, I had to load the plate with a full set of four AA batteries. That’s naturally frustrating if your AA-powered gadget only uses one, two or three batteries. There’s also no capacity gauge display for charging AA batteries, nor a facility to charge smaller AAA batteries.

The charger comes with two ‘keys’ so you have a spare, which is nice as they’re easily lost. And if you lose both, any small spike will suffice, maybe even a toothpick. Long story short, the different baseplates enable a variety of camera manufacturer’s batteries to slot in and be charged. The only downside is that you can only charge two of the same variants of battery at the same time so, for example sticking with Nikon, you can’t charge one EN-EL15 and one EN-EL25 battery simultaneously. No real surprise.

hähnel ProCube3: Performance

It’s not just about good looks or excellent build quality, based on the charger’s aluminum shell. The proof of the pudding is in the performance. An upgrade over the ProCube2 in this respect is that the Mark 3 can charge two Li-ion camera batteries just as quickly as it can charge one. Load up the dual slots and you can expect to charge flat camera batteries to a full state of charge in a timescale ranging from about 60 minutes to 135 minutes, depending on type and capacity.

For my Nikon version, a full charge from flat takes around 60 minutes for EN-EL14 or EN-EL25 batteries, and 90 minutes for the EN-EL15 series of batteries. That’s pretty darned quick compared with many camera battery chargers. Pop across to the AA ballpark and you can charge a set of four high-capacity 2500mAh AA Ni-MH batteries in around 240 minutes. Again, that’s pretty swift while avoiding the danger of overcooking your AA batteries in the process.

The illuminated info display keeps you up to date with what’s going on. It shows the charge capacity of either one or two camera batteries independently, plus the amount of juice being supplied to each, the current readout swapping between one and the other. I say ‘up to date’ but I found the charge capacity display a little over ambitious. Something that the ProCube3 seems to have inherited from the previous model is that the capacity displays as 100% when camera batteries aren’t fully charged. As with the Mark II, I waited patiently for ‘100%’ to come up on the clock and then slotted my genuine Nikon EN-EL15c batteries back into my Z 6II camera.

The camera itself disagreed, saying the two batteries were only 85% and 87% charged respectively. I popped them into own-brand Nikon MH-25A chargers and got a blinking orange light representing further charging for no less than 35 minutes, after which the batteries showed as 100% charged on the in-camera display. T

he moral of the story is not to trust the battery charge display on the ProCube3, which hähnel itself says is only ‘approximate’. After further testing with a couple more batteries, I found that leaving them on charge for about 20 minutes after I got the 100% indication fixed the problem. Even so, I’m not particularly impressed, as I’ve got a couple of super low-budget, obscure brand battery chargers that recognize when my Nikon batteries are fully charged, and when they’re not.

Back on the upside of performance, I like that the ProCube3 can fast-charge dead batteries when unmissable photo opportunities are looming. Typically, a 15-minute charge will boost a dead battery enough to take around 150 photos. The ‘top-up charge’ also comes complete with a free battery health check. All in all, performance is admirable, display ‘approximation’ aside.

hähnel ProCube3: Verdict

The golden child of battery chargers, the Nikon gold sample (ok, yellow if you want the official hähnel line) charged batteries for my Nikon Z 6II and Nikon Z fc cameras quickly and efficiently. The 100% capacity reading was inaccurate but that’s easy to adjust to, and I’m happy to leave my batteries on charge a little longer. The ProCube3 is similarly adept at charging AA batteries, which I often use in my flashguns and other camera and non-camera-related gadgets, although it can only charge batches of four, as it doesn’t have independent AA charging channels. All in all, it’s an impeccably presented charger that’s mostly as good as it looks, and it really does look rather good, but I think there’s still room for improvement.

Alternatives

The hähnel UniPal Plus is a universal charger for camera batteries. Adjustable pins and a spring-loaded sliding cover enable it to adapt to pretty much any camera battery. Costin around $40/£50, it comes with a mains adapter, 12v car charger, USB output socket and the ability to charge up two AA or AAA batteries.

The Jupio Tri-Charge is available in an increasing range of models, the first three catering to either Sony NP-FZ100, Nikon EN-EL15, or Canon LP-E6 camera batteries. It can charge and store three camera batteries, as well as supplying supply to other devices via a USB-C output, and costs around $130/£130