Ill Logik, give the Rayovac PS4 charger a try. Price is about the same and you can find it in any Wal-Mart or Target store. It’s a better charger as it charges each cell individually, not in pairs.
I have the Maha charger and batteries mentioned in Ill Logik’s link. It’s excellent, and you’ll have no problems with it. It’s also nice having the car adaptor for long road trips.
All modern digitial cameras are compatible with NiMH batteries if they take AAs. It’d be silly to operate one without them.
Strike up a relationship with the kid(s) that run the 1 hour photolab at your local grocery/drug store. Every disposable camera they take in for developing with a flash has one AA battery inside. My kid works there and I have AA batteries coming out the wazoo.
I bet you could offer ten cents a battery as a “side job” for the teens in the lab and have a win-win situation. Better still, start to date the photo lab geek. The batteries from the cameras are lightly used and I’ve even seen them for sale in some outlet stores.
At a photo shop I used to frequent they had a bin of AA batteries for .25 each, eventually just giving them away for free. I would grab some each time I was there.
Two problems. First, the batteries are the cheapest available, they last even shorter time than regular alkilines.
Second, in digital cameras, alkalines only last an extremely short time, some only give 30 minutes of photo taking. You’ll have to carry around a huge bag of them for a weekend trip and be constantly changing batteries. Since I mainly use by DC for hiking I’m certainly not going to carry a huge pile of batteries. For others it might be an OK solution, but you’ll be changing them every time you use the camera.
Tangential to the main topic: Cecil Adams on Do nickel-cadmium batteries develop “charge memory” if not fully discharged?