The main competitor to the BC-1000 is the Maha MH-C9000 ($52). Here how the Maha differs from the BC-1000:
PRO:
- More (and higher) options for charge & discharge current
- Can often revive dead cells (with very low voltage) that the BC series doesn't recognize (though you can use my tricks to revive dead cells yourself)
- Discharges down to only 1.0V (vs. 0.9V for the La Crosse models), which preserves cycle life. An artifact of this is that the Maha will show a lower capacity when testing than the La Crosse (about 5% difference).
- Can measure remaining capacity with the discharge program (which is really useful only if, say, you're writing articles on how much capacity a battery retains after sitting idle for six months)
CON
- Poor interface requires lots of keypresses to get anything done. NLee says charging 4 cells at 2A requires 48 keystrokes! That's why I bought a La Crosse instead of the Maha.
- Doesn't fully charge eneloops, unless you leave them in the charger for a while after the charger says they're done. (NLee)
- You can't pause the cycling on the display, or even make it advance to the metric you want. It constantly cycles between capacity, current, time, and voltage on its own, at its own pace (of 8 seconds per cell). Besides being annoying, it means you have to wait to get the data you want. Getting, say, the voltage for all four cells could take a while.
Here's NLee's comparison of the two chargers, and here's a spec comparison. An excerpt of NLee's review: "Compared to the La Crosse BC-900, this model is a lot bigger. In theory it charges faster than the BC-900, but takes so many keystrokes to set up the fast-charging that it's not worth the bother. It shows the status for only one cell at a time, cycling through them all by itself—you can't hit a key to see the next cell's status, and it takes nearly a full minute to cycle through all four cells. (The BC-900, by contrast, shows all four cells' status simultaneously.) On the plus side, it can revive dead batteries that the BC-900 can't, but that's not a huge advantage since you can revive dead batteries yourself with the instructions below." also the best battery charger is SUNJACK USB BATTERY CHARGER