Zanflare C4 Universal Battery Charger with Car Adapter, 18650 Smart Charger LCD Display For Ni-MH Ni-Cd AA AAA AAAA SC, Li-ion 18650 26650 26500 22650 18490 17670 17500 Rechargeable Batteries Charger

I am delighted with this product. It does everything as described and the user interface is well thought out, very simple to use. 24h after delivery I have already done the thorough test on 12 reclaimed cells. I retested the duff cells and obtained similar results second time.There is a quick test, and a thorough test. The latter can be performed at 2 different drain rates (300 adn 500mA). It gives the capacity, peak voltage, internal resistance and current drain used and duration from full to discharged.When charging you can charge at 300, 500, 700 or 1000 mA.Each battery bay can act entirely independently e.g. you can be testing one cell, charging another etc simultaneously and you can mix NiMH and Lithium.It seems like a good build quality. I can't find a bad thing to say about this product, except it is not quite the very cheapest charger on the market. Well worth the small premium cost though.

This is a very well built and versatile charger at a very decent price. It's easy to use - once you realise that batteries are inserted "upside-down" if you're used to other chargers! Not a problem if you observe the clearly marked polarity on the charger, though ...Both the charge and discharge features work well and I've used these on several battery types - even the ancient "gumstick"-style batteries that were used in Sony Walkmans and similar. It's a bit fiddly getting the gumstick to make proper contact but I eventually found that a penny does the trick! See first photo. I charge the gumsticks at the lowest 300mAh setting and I've found that the discharge test works fine with these too. I also charged a half-AA size (14250) Li-ion battery with the aid of a copper spacer (an 8mm pipe stop end) and that worked well too - see second pic.I'd not heard of Zanflare before but I found very useful reviews on Youtube (user=Mr Baz Reviews) and on the Danish lygte-info website (add the dot dk suffix). According to the reviews, some (non-Zanflare) chargers are a bit noisy and get quite warm but this Zanflare does neither - seems to be one of the best out there at the moment.

I have been using BC-700 type chargers for years for charging AAA and AA Ni-MH and have been very pleased with the results (even the clones are good quality like Youshiko YC4000 and Uniross Ultimate). However these chargers do not work with Li-Ion batteries like the popular 18650 which is used in modern LED torches and vapers. So I needed another charger, preferably one that has a discharge mode too for testing. This Zanflare C4 model seemed popular and very good value with a 10% voucher offer. And I have to say I am not disappointed, this is a simple to use device which automatically detects battery type and can charge at 300, 500, 700 and 1000 milli amps. Like the BC-700 clones each of the four slots is independent and stats for all 4 slots are displayed simultaneously. This displays the usual Voltage, Amps. mAh and time, but also has a very useful internal resistance measurement. It is just a shame that this internal resistance is only read once when you insert the battery and not updated (like with the MiBoxer C4 charger for example) - to get an accurate indicator of IR you should reinsert the battery once charged, good 18650s like the Samsung 25R will have an IR of about 25 milli-ohms, it is a quick way of determining whether your batteries are dying (several hundred milli-ohms).We also have two nice test modes, Fast test (discharge then fully charge and measure how much mAh went in) and Normal test (fully charge, then discharge (down to 2.8v for Li-Ion and ~0.9v for Ni-Mh) and measure how much mAh was discharged, then fully recharge) - the latter method takes longer but is the more useful and accurate way to test capacity (although in reality it depends on the application, you are only allowed to discharge at two currents, 300 or 500 milli amps which is a bit limited). One thing to note is that this charger seems to slightly over report capacity compared to other chargers - but this value is only an approximate indicator in any case, as it depends on the application and current rates.The USB ouput only works with Lithium batteries present in the slots, which is a shame really, my YC4000 charger has USB output when plugged in, I understand that this makes the Zanfare C4 a potential portable powerbank, but it is so large you will be unlikely to use it in this way, and mostly will just want to charge things at home, so it's a nuisance to have to find spare Li-Ion batteries to insert when the charger can just be plugged in to the mains.But this is only a minor issue, overall I can recommend this charger, especially at less than £25, it is solidly built, has good spring tension and seems to have good reliability and longevity according to user posts on related forums. Makes a nice addition alongside my old trusty AA/AAA chargers - it's always nice to have extra options too!