Sony BCG-34HRMF4 Battery Charger with LCD Display and 4 AA Ni-MH Rechargeable Batteries

Be careful when shopping for your batteries. When first shopping for batteries I figured "a battery is a battery, right?" Wrong. You want to look at the mAh (milli amerage hours -- or something like that.) The higher the mAh, the better. These ones are 2700 mAh which is about the highest I've seen. I bought these for my Canon SX110IS, and the life on these batteries totally exceeded my expectations. And from my understanding, the charge life will improve with more frequent use.

PROS:
Battery Life
Charging indicator
Refresh function

CONS:
You can't plug the actual charger directly into the wall. The only option is a ~6ft cord that plugs into the wall from the charger.

Charging time wasn't really relevant to me. My camera requires two batteries, so I just charge one set while I'm using the other set. It takes a couple hours for these batteries to charge, so my spare set of batteries ends up sitting around in a drawer for a long time while I am trying to drain the juice in the batteries in my camera.

I'm pretty happy with the Sony charger. I'm not a professional with this sort of thing but I like it. It does what it's supposed to do and it's compact enough to travel with. The batteries last pretty long, I was surprised. I have a SX110IS Canon and they were work well with it. Went on vacation and took a couple hundred pics and towards the end of those pics I changed the batteries to fresh ones simply because the warning came on...they'd have gone a bit longer. Small and inexpensive charger that does the job.

This is a great all-around Ni-MH battery charger. I wouldn't call it "super-quick", but that's not what I bought it for. I purchased this charger 3.5 years ago with a digital camera and another set of 4 sony batteries so that I could always have 4 in the camera and 4 charged backups. This setup worked great and kept me shooting for 3.5 years and thousands of photos. Finally the batteries have given up the ghost and will no longer hold a charge, so I'm back to buy more of the batteries as the charger still works perfectly. This is a great deal considering the hundreds of alkaline batteries I'd have gone through in the lifespan of these NiMH batteries. I also use this charger to recharge the non-sony AAA batteries I use in my cordless mouse, remote controls, etc.

The charger is pretty good in appearance and LCD to show the statue of charging, but the charger time is a little bit long.

The charger is great. What I really like is the meter dislay that shows status of each battery in the charger. If you have a bad battery - the display for that battery flashes rapidly so you know to toss that particular one. The refresh feature is also nice to have available. Other reviews mention flimsy cover and it's true that you could easily break it off but as far as I can tell, it is mostly cosmetic. I leave it open when charging to prevent heat buid-up anyway. I have no real opinion on the 4 batteries that come with the charger - they seem as good if not better than any other brand. I wanted a good charger and consider the 4 batts to be an extra freebie.