There's a little device making a big difference here.

It charges cells INDIVIDUALLY to their full capacity. It isn't fast, but it gets a lot more in there than my fast charger. It also does alkalines, which is great because quite often a piece of kit will fail and previously we'd just simply replace all the batteries. What I'm finding now is that often only a single cell (out of 3 or 4) has gone west, and the others can be refreshed while the duff one is swapped for another.

Normally I used NiMH but occasionally Alkalines work better. This is really handy.