Ug, what a craptastic effort. I'm really unimpressed with Tom's. Some of these articles are just ridiculously weak, like this one. If the author had just searched for and read a few other articles about rechargeable batteries, he or she would have been able to write a much better article. This one deserves a "B" for presentation but a "D" for content, as is usually the case with Tom's. It avoids being totally worthless because the author did make a few useful points, like about the voltage of the new chemistry batteries and the slightly larger diameter of some of them.
But why in the world would you test each battery only with its included charger? Who buys four AA's with a charger each and every time? You buy one bundle, maybe two, and then you buy just batteries. Who needs a half dozen chargers plugged in around the house? So why not test the batteries in the other chargers, or better yet, use a high quality charger to get accurate readings off the batteries?
The use of a decent charger (something like the Maha WizardOne or similar, $50) would have been obvious from doing any amount of background research. It would have let the reviewer automatically charge batteries properly with high quality electronics, ensuring they hold as much as they can. Good chargers also tell you the battery's true capacity (in MAH) by draining them, charging them, and then draining them again and automatically keeping track of the total juice they held and the voltage at which it was delivered.
Using a decent charger would also have let the reviewer judge the bundled chargers. Maybe a bundled charger is to blame, not the batteries. So what good is it to pan Energizer brand batteries based on the Energizer charger? What if you're at the store and there's a super clearance on Energizers and you already have a non-Energizer charger at home? Well, my experience tells me I should buy the Energizers (the pre-charged type, at least) because they perform very well, in general, using my WizardOne. They hold between two thirds and 100% of their claimed MAH capacity, compared to about 90% for the Eneloops. If I relied on Tom's, though, I would pass up the clearance sale, thinking that the Energizers were bad when they really may be good. A smarter charger also is likely to use less energy, as its more advanced charge state circuitry knows when to stop charging the batteries and gently trickle charge them to keep them up. It can also easily bring weakened batteries back to life with drain and recharge cycles, which can really help, especially if the batteries you just bought were sitting on the shelf for a year and a half. If the point is to have cheap, never-ending batteries that you very rarely need to throw out and that last a really long long time, then read Consumer Reports to begin with (yup, CR's article was far more useful than Tom's). Better yet, check the several excellent websites out there that have informative articles on the topic.