I'd say it doesn't make much of a difference it's all how the camera handles the charge, I mean I have a canon EX big *** flash and it's recycle is pretty much instant(as fast as the camera can fire) and it uses 4 AA batterys, so I would assume the power is avaible with four AA's it's all about the circuity in the camera. but basicly your going to see the fastest recycling times on the powerzoom cameras(sometimes 4 AA's sometimes li-ion) and even faster on dslr's(which have proprietary batterys)
I read a comment somewhere that to have fast flash recycle times, the digicam's gotta have either 4 AA batteries or a proprietary li-ion battery since those 2 types will be able to recharge the flash quickly. Is this completely true, true for the most part, or just false? If false, please also provide a counter example model of a digicam.
I've tried out some digicams a while back that take 2 AA batts (of course, the batts in the demo models probably varied) and noticed flash recycle times ranged anywhere from 5.5s to 11s (using my stopwatch). Other digicams ranged from 3 to 6s. I'll need to go back sometime and take note of the model and batt types they used, but it seems like this makes sense and something I never noticed till now.

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