William P.N. Smith wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
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:
- Mixing up the battery types.
- 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.