Question about lithium ion batterys?

Question

I just bought a camera, which uses it's own specific lithium ion battery. So, i took it out the package, i crged it for 5 minutes so it had some power. Anyway, my mum said, that when she was younger, you were supposed to charge stuff up fully, otherwise for the rest of the cameras life, it would only hold the same amount of charge of when you first used it. Is this true, and does this affect modern lithium ion? By the way its Sanyo, if that helps.

Thanks

Answer 1

Jivo is right. but the first charge is by far the most important so dont do it again. it is bad for the life of the battery.

Answer 2

Older type batteries had to be recharged completely. Because they had a kind of "memory". Not fully charging them would reduce their capacity.

This is still true for Lithium-Ion batteries, but you can almost neglect this loss. So several times not completely recharging the battery wouldn't make any noticable difference, but continuously not recharging the battery would.