We're on our third baby monitor. The first was some Graco/FirstBaby something-or-other brand whose salient feature was that it had two receivers. We thought (mistakenly) that we'd need two receivers, one we could leave in the kitchen, and one in our bedroom. We were wrong.

This is what we needed: rock solid reception, lots of channels, rechargeable bulletproof batteries, a visible indicator of noise. Our second (and third, I dropped the second on the kitchen floor and it broke) set of monitors are the Sony BabyCall Rechargeable (NTM-910). It works like a dream, which is to say, we never have to think about it.

Set the channels on each piece (they are color-coded for ease). Plug one into an outlet in your baby's room. Plug the other in, say, your kitchen. Charge the receiver. Use. In four years of use (before I dropped it) we did not notice a fall-off in battery power or longevity. We typically plug it in overnight (we don't usually use it at night, we can hear the baby from our room, but when I have, it has lasted all night without being plugged in), and use it during the day. We can carry it out into the yard without getting out of range (it has a very annoying = effective alarm when it loses the signal). When we put the baby down and he is wailing before he gives up and goes to sleep, we can turn the volume down but still see him cry on the bright red lights. It does have a "voice activated" feature we don't use, as it is somewhat masked by the noise machine we have in the baby's room.

It is cheap ($40 at Amazon) and relatively frill-less. And perfect. So perfect we bought another when I dropped the first.