I have found that quality varies greatly in "intelligent" chargers. Those Energizer/RayoVac/Duracall chargers you can buy in reatil stores are not very good for long term use of re-chargeables but since most people don't have lots of them and track their usage they will never know that they only got a couple hundred cycles out of a set of bateries.
I found that once I bought a MAHA charger my batteries started lasting longer and old ones that weren't working very well and I was ready to replace started being useable again. So this time around I bought a decent charger to protect my battery investment. The charger was only $40 and I spent $25 on a charger for WalMart before so it wasn't that much difference.