ItsJustMe

If I ever think of a reason I'd want GPS on my bike, it'd make sense a little I guess.

I don't have any camera batteries that cost $20; even the SLR LiIon batteries are only about $10 each. The AA NiMHs that I have that are more than 6 years old are indeed working well, but since they were only 1600 mAH to start with, they're still getting thrown out as the new cells are pushing around 2600mAH on actual tests.

The big win on LiIon up until recently was that the NiMHs self-discharged so badly that I had to charge my camera batteries every 3 or 4 weeks even if I didn't use the camera, or it'd be showing low battery after just a dozen shots or so. With the new low-self-discharge cells that's not much of a problem, but hey, guess what, that means I'm replacing all my batteries again.

No charger that I know of costs $60 unless you're really getting ripped off. I paid $36 for my LaCrosse NiMH, and there are no really better chargers around; the Maha high end costs more, but it's not really better. LiIon based devices all come with one battery and a charger so I rarely buy a charger for them, and even if I do, aftermarket chargers for LiIon are VERY cheap - turns out LiIon cells are trivial to build charge circuits for; I pay < $10 for any LiIon charger I've bought recently and had no problems.

I actually really like AA NiMH and have been a proponent of them for a long time, but at the end of the day I don't find it a big deal to manage multiple batteries. I have two things that take AA NiMHs, my Dinotte taillight and my camera flash. My SLR takes one LiIon cell, my headlight takes another, that's it. The headlight needs charging daily, so I just have a charger under the desk at work. As a bonus, a LiIon cell charger costs $8; they're simple. The SLR lasts on the order of 800 shots on a charge, so except for vacations I go through one charge a month or so, and I have three packs so I could get away with digging our the charger every 3 months if I wanted (because with LiIon, the charge DOES last that long).

Bottom line is that yes, there are multiple chargers, but the batteries last so long that I honestly don't usually even bother packing a charger unless I'm going to be gone quite a while (like more than a week) and expect to use the camera a lot.

At one time I think everything I had used AA NiMH cells, but I don't allow battery type to cause me to buy a device with inferior features, and in the case of my headlight, that was the case, and SLRs really aren't available that take AA cells (except with a battery grip, and even then, they're ridiculous, getting very few shots per set of cells).

Honestly, my point-and-shoot takes AAs, but I only shoot 30 frames a month or so with it, so I load it with Lithium AA cells. So far I've been going a year on the same 2 batteries, and they weren't new when I put them in. It's still not complaining about low batteries.