Charger Shootout – Interface
Interface
The actual user interface is extremely important to us. As technology advances, so does the complexity of getting the job done. A nice user interface can make or break a deal. The charger might be able to do everything under the sun, but if it’s a real pain to use, we would rather loose a few features to make life easier.
Since this category is important, and subjective several of us used all the chargers and rated them on how easy they were to use, was the interface intuitive, did you need the manual? How was the overall experience? Because of it’s importance, the Interface category is worth double points. Everyone here feels very strongly about the interface, and were in agreement that it should be worth twice as much as the other categories.
| Points | Manufacturer/Charger | Ease of Use |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | Team Checkpoint TC1030 | Awesome |
| 4 | Hyperion 720i | Very Good |
| 4 | Hyperion 615i Duo | Very Good |
| 4 | Duratrax Onyx 220 | Very Good |
| 10 | Venom Pro Plus | Could be better |
| 12 | FMA CellPro 10S | Uhg. |
Everyone clearly loved the Team Checkpoint charger interface. It’s amazingly easy to use, and it shows you all the data and settings on one screen. Using the dial to change and adjust settings is great. If we ever just need to charge something quick, the Checkpoint is always our go-to charger.
The two Hyperion’s and the Onyx all have pretty good interfaces. It’s hard to compete with the giant screen of the Checkpoint, but navigating around the menus was relatively easy, and you could quickly find the settings you wanted to.
The Venom interface just wasn’t as smooth as the others. You couldn’t easily jump around the settings. You needed to ‘load’ memory settings, and we had some issues with the mah settings that we talk about in a different part of the shootout.
The CellPro 10S was a little more painful to navigate around. There’s no doubt it’s one of the smartest chargers out there, but using it was sometimes a chore. One of our tests was ‘Can you charge a pack easily’. Everyone failed at this with the CellPro 10S. The way the wiring needs to be crossed for 1S or 2S charging just wasn’t intuitive and for several of us it took a long time and some manual reading to actually figure it out. Only having two input buttons for everything also made it tough.
Remember: The tests are all scored by points, lowest to highest. The lower the score the better, like a game of golf.
