Quote Originally Posted by Doc Harry View Post
That's my point. NiMH batteries are unreliable. I had fully-charged NiMH batteries showing full voltage. You'd think they would be fine. But then - BAM! - in a matter of a minute they're dead. How can you predict which fully-charged, full-votlage NiMH batteries will last and which will die in a matter or minutes? You can't. That's my point.

Not the kind of performance and reliability you'd want in a critical piece of equipment like a backup light.

Sounds like a bad, cheap charger. The cheap chargers will run 2 amps into a battery for an hour and drastically shorten it's life span. A better charge will have a microcontroller in there, to monitor temperature and adjust it's algorithms accordingly. The best will offer a conditioning routine, where they deep cycle the battery and often bring them back from the dead.

I bet if you put the batteries in a charger that could condition them, they would come back to life.

I put rechargeables in my wife camera and strobe and they lasted all week. (she took around 400 pictures.) Just depends how you treat em.