Albert Taylor 2008-11-16
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
This smart charger is such an improvement over the standard no-frills chargers that I've had over the years. This one can find batteries that are past their rechargable prime and also rejuvinate others to get the most out of them.
Most standard chargers can't tell if one of the batteries you're charging isn't keeping up with the rest. They're all charged for the same amount of time with no regard for the individual battery's condition. By charging each battery individually you can find out if one of them isn't charging to it's fullest capacity which will ultimately determine how long that camera, flash unit, or toy runs. If you've got a bad battery in with the others it's going to shorten the run time of whatever it's in.
You can run it through the discharge/charge cycle and bring it back to it's fullest capacity, or if you find that it's just run out of life and is no longer taking a full charge you can take it out of service and eliminate the source of shortened run times in you electronic appliances.
The refresh mode to me takes too long, several days sometimes, to discharge and charge the battery repeatedly until it can hold no higher capacity. I've found just running one that may be lagging behind through the regular discharge mode a time or two which discharges and then charges the battery one time seems to bring back a battery that has lost it's energy.
After you've run your batteries on the "smart" La Crosse charger you'll find that they last longer because they've been individually charged to their highest individual capacity instead of being cut off mid charge because the "dumb" charger has no way of knowing whether the individual battery has really been fully charged.
It's a good thing...
