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If you're searching for high-end NiMH battery chargers, you'll find the number of contending products is few. Only two consumer-level battery chargers are competing for the top slot: the La Crosse Technology BC-900 AlphaPower Battery Charger and the Powerex MH-C9000 WizardOne battery charger. For this review, I purchased them both and conducted numerous tests over a period of several weeks. Ultimately, I liked the Powerex MH-C9000 so much that I decided to carry it on www.BetterLifeGoods.com , so keep that in mind as you read this review. Here's my critical look at both products:
The La Crosse BC-900 Battery ChargerThe BC-900 offers four main modes:
• Charge: Charges the battery to full capacity.
• Discharge: Discharges the battery to empty.
• Refresh: Cycles the battery multiple times to restore better performance.
• Test: Determines the actual capacity of the battery in mAh.
If offers multiple safety features such as temperature sending, polarity detection and a way to determine if batteries are defective. Four independent channels allow you to charge batteries separately, and an LCD display shows you the status of each battery.
The features of the BC-900 sound very strong on paper, but in actually using the product, I found it to be extremely confusing, difficult to use and finicky. The display has no backlight, making it quite difficult to read, and the control buttons don't respond in a timely manner. Each time I inserted a battery, I ended up pressing the buttons several times to get the setting I wanted. Even worse, I soon learned that if you inserted a new battery too quickly after selecting settings for another battery, all your settings for the previous battery would disappear in a flash, and the charger would revert to "default" charging.
As a result, actually getting the BC-900 to analyze four batteries in a row was frustrating and tedious. Here's what I found works: 1) Insert a battery in slot 1. 2) Click the MODE button until you get the TEST feature to appear. 3) Keep clicking the CURRENT button until you get a higher current like 250mA (leaving it on 100mA, the default, can result in the test mode taking days to complete). 4) Now WAIT for the display to stop flashing before you insert a second battery. This can take about eight seconds. If you insert a second battery before the display stops flashing, then all the settings you just configured for the first battery will be wiped out.
Once the flashing stops, insert the second battery and repeat this process. If you manage to get that to work, repeat for batteries 3 and 4. Keep in mind that during this whole process, you only have a few seconds to select the settings for a new battery that's been inserted. If you take too long, the battery reverts to default settings and you have to pull it out and start over. Complicating this whole thing is that bizarre limitation that if you select 100mA for a battery in slot 1, the BC-900 will not let you select a higher current for slot 2, so you have to plan the charging currents for your batteries in advance, then sort your batteries from highest to lowest charge currents, and insert them from left to right.
Needless to say, this whole process is frustrating enough to make you want to throw the BC-900 against the wall and smash it into a thousand tiny pieces. It is by far the most frustrating piece of battery-related electronics I've ever owned. Sometimes, I wonder if the person who designed it had any training at all in basic user interface design. Given that most consumers can hardly manage to set the time and date on their camcorder, I think this product is far too complex for the average consumer to figure out. It left me downright angry at the La Crosse company for putting out what I considered to be such a lousy product.
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Wednesday, June 13, 2007
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