Only Sony Super Quick Charger with it's unique LCD Battery Indicator allows you to view the status of the battery charging process. The charges comes equipped with an advanced safety functions including alkaline battey detection, automatic charge off and built-in temperature controls. It charges up t a AA or AAA Ni-MH batteries. High Capacity 2300 mAh.
1 super quick charger
This is no where near super quick.
The only reason I wanted a third charger was because the time it takes to charge the batteries.
The description here mentions no word about how long it actually takes to charge, and one of reviewers told me it took about 30 to 60 minutes to charge.
I was only to find that it takes 230 minutes to charge the 2300 batteries come with the charger after I bought it, and the actual testing confirmed that number. 230 minutes, that's ~4 hours, which means over night charging, NOT acceptable.
The LCD and REFRESH features are nice, but I am not paying $30 for those 2 features.
Another thing that bothers me, it has a really long cord, similar to Laptop cords, the cord plugs into the wall and charger, instead of the built-in plug found in most other charges, this would become annoying when travelling.
If you don't mind the 4 hour charging time (no where near super quick for May,2005 standards), it is a great charger.
2 Good but not great
This looked like an interesting charger and battery set at thirty dollars. It looked a little less good considering the listed shipping cost from TigerDirect (more than seven dollars). Ultimately, TigerDirect's alarmingly low customer satisfaction ratings and negative customer feedback (found by an internet search) led me to look elsewhere for this item.
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New 2-16-05: This item is now offered by Amazon rather than Tiger Direct. I've already bought one locally for about the same price. The cells are excellent. The charger is okay but needlessly complicated. It charges a set of four high-capacity NiMH cells in a few hours -- "quick" in ad lingo. The replaceable standard cord and universal voltage are good, and the four individual cell display and control circuit design is good, but the "conditioning" feature is unnecessary because most electronic gadgets will run cells down to 1V or lower before they stop, thus performing the same task, and NiMH cells are reportedly IMMUNE to "memory" effects, making the task itself pointless. The bar-graph display for each cell also has no detectable relationship to terminal voltage or cell capacity -- reminiscent of the silly uncalibrated gauges on some cheap cars. Sony prudently lists this charger as suitable only for NiMH and not NiCd cells - and it's easy to see why. The charge rate is high enough to make NiCd cells vent from heat, ruining them. NiMH cells (at least those I've tried) don't vent but they get very hot -- so hot I don't dare put freshly charged cells in my cameras without letting them cool first.
A simpler, gentler charger -- for about the same price considering the four AA cells included with this Sony charger -- is Amazon's B0001XQN7A. It does an excellent job of charging and equalizing matched sets of NiMH and NiCd cells, and I've used the type for more than five years without any problems or malfunctions whatsoever. It even does a good job on the nearly bombproof old Sanyo sintered-anode industrial NiCd cells that won't charge at all in the Sony machine.
3 Best on Amazon
Of what I saw when I was looking, this is the best charger and battery set on amazon right now. Best feature set and best batteries (2300mah) for the price. The refresh feature is a must and the LCD readout is very nice looking. Go for it.
4 Cool design.. Great functionality !
I just love this battery charger. It has a real sleek design with very light weight. Charges real fast. Features like individual battery charge level display and automatic charging cut-off on reaching maximum are useful. I tried refresh function with my old rechargeable batteries and found it working. I am a happy buyer.
5 Excellent.
I've found this to be an excellent charger, as long as you only need to charge AA and AAA batteries. The charge cycle is quite fast, the design is good-looking and functional, and the refresh feature has restored quite a bit of lost capacity to some of my older batteries.
By the way, to answer an issue raised in a previous review, you know that a battery is fully charged when the LCD display stops flashing for that battery.
6 Nice recharger
I have one of these rechargers. It's very well built, has a clean desing. It's a Sony. A nice feature is it's LCD screen. You can follow the refreshing or recharging process for each battery (up to 4). It has some sort of probe that avoid over heating batteries. The only one thing I did not like is it's manual. It's not clear on explaining how recharger shows when a battery is fully charged. It says it turns off, but I tried and recharged several batteries but the lcd never came off, even thoug the temperature of batteries became cool, meaning (at least I guess so) they are not being recharged any more. If anyone could inform how to discover when the batteries are fully charged, please inform me.
