Digital Scale Shootout

alright folks welcome back today it's finally time to talk about digital scales this video has been a long time coming kept putting it off because I didn't really have a good recommendation to make and I'll be upfront with you here I really still don't have a scale I'm a hundred percent happy with but as you can see I've got 16 different cheap digital scales well there's a couple that aren't so cheap but we'll talk about those as we go along but most of these are cheap scales from Amazon and I'll tell you what let's not bury the lead here let me show you my three favorites all right here they are these two right here which look pretty much exactly the same are from True Way one is called the real oder marksman and the other is called the lux mini this guy over here is from Bry fit it doesn't really have a catchy name but it's a 50 gram scale and we'll get into some confusion with Bry fit I've got four of their scales and you have to be very careful to pick the right one when when yeah when it comes to those guys so let's start out with the two the two true ways this is the reloader the first thing I hate about it is the cover it comes off like this and it's like what in the world do you do with that I guess you can sit it back there somewhere I don't know here's the other one same exact lid these are both hundred gram scales and if we flip them on you'll see that they read in point one grain increments so like if we throw a 0.5 grain cheque weight on there you see 0.5 grains and back over here to the other one 0.5 grains now the difference between these two scales are accessories this is the luxe Mini which you have to be careful there's a there's a big looks that looks exactly the same but it's a 1 kilogram or you know a thousand gram scale that's a completely different animal this is the luxe Mini so these two scales are exactly the same here's my favorite feature about them if you press and hold the mode button you'll see it comes up and says au o FF auto off that just disabled the auto off feature so let's do the same thing over here with this guy and now these two scales will stay on until their batteries die that's a huge frustration with a lot of the small miniature scales is they have a quick auto off and it really interrupts your flow as you're reloading and measuring powders the lux mini comes with nothing it comes with a calibration weight and I think that's pretty much it the reloader marksman however comes in this really nice box like really really sturdy box and it's got like you know magnetic latch on it and then it opens up and I don't have anything in here let me throw one in there it comes with a powder pan it's actually the correct size for reloading work that's a huge frustration when buying some of these cheap scales off Amazon they either don't come with any pain whatsoever or they come with an itty bitty tiny little pan that's just too small for reloading so the marksman comes with a pan comes with a nice box that should last for years of storing it and stuff and other than that I found these two functionally identical so let's go ahead and get that guy out of the way now the problem with these is they're the price the marksman is currently going for $44.99 I bought this one six or eight months ago and I paid 40 dollars and 85 cents and unfortunately that $44.99 price tag we're getting right now has been stable looking at like Amazon pricing history it's been that way since around July so that's almost six months the price hasn't budged and it's been $44.99 this one's been on the market a little bit a little while so like a year and a half they were a year and a half ago they were $34.99 so they bumped up in price but listen I'm telling you finding a pan like this is not easy they are available over at Midway for around ten bucks a very similar pain to this it's the it's the reading powder pan number two that that's very similar to this and it's ten bucks so it's worth a few extra bucks just because of well for one like I said the nice box for storage and a good powder pan that comes with it but if you've already got a powder pan that might not matter for you the lux mini is currently going for $34.99 so ten bucks cheaper but the pricing history at amazon shows that this one as recently as just two months ago was going for 1990 1984 and then it bumped up to 31 99 about a month ago so if you're wanting the lux mini you might watch that price and wait for a dip so my biggest downside is that lid that's a pain in the butt and also the pain going all the way to the edge you've really got to be careful because that's the fastest way to kill one of these cheap digital scales is to lay something heavy on the load sensor so the load sensor is not really protected and it would be very easy to tip something onto it and screw up your scale one thing I really like is here's a 20 grain check weight 20.0 I found that it reads very accurately even all the way up to the edge it's a twenty point zero on that corner 20 point zero on that corner perfect on that corner and it'll be the same here on the back corner so you don't have to obsess about getting things perfectly centered of course that's always the best thing to do is to get it centered right above that load cell thingy but the marksman and the luck seem to give you some wiggle room there it's not the fastest scale like it's not the snappiest scale you put the weight on there and it does take just a second to give you your number but it's not annoyingly slow some scales are just extremely annoyingly slow so I wish these were a little bit cheaper but they're not and speaking of cheaper let's bring in the bright fit there you go Bri fi T this one also had tell you what let's fire it up get it get it warming up a little bit this scale is 1699 so it definitely represents the best value that I found the lid for it is a little bit annoying can act as a windscreen you know you can get this little thing where you can put stuff down in there whatever but for reloading where we need to take a big powder pan on and off it's best to just remove it let me see if I can raise up my camera there we go that's a little bit better angle and that's another reason why you'll probably see me using these more often than this guy just because with the angled screen it's easier for me to get them on camera and these really take that overhead view so if you if you reload sitting down a lot the angled screen might be something else to keep in keep in mind now unfortunately this scale you cannot turn off the auto off feature it has a three minute timeout and that's what that's what I've gotten used to because here's you know here's the Old Faithful this is the one I've been using for several years that isn't available anymore there are scales that look like this actually here's one of them and here's another one of them we flip these on really quick now you'll see Old Faithful here reads 2.1 grains where the newer versions which are the only ones that I know of that are available read 2.0 - grains like it there if we put a little check weight on there you can see 20.00 I was hoping it might read a couple of tenths off so I could illustrate what I'm talking about no there there you go and they're pretty darn accurate they do a pretty good job but when you have that extra digit you know you go from reading one tenth of a grain to point zero two grains it's easy for a guy like me to get obsessive try and get things a little bit more perfect than they really need to be but otherwise these are these are really good scales if you've bought one of these recently that reads in point one grain increments please let me know down in the comments I want to get one I want to see if it's the same as the old one but a lot of people have bought the the newer version as well and and they're not bad still a solid choice now back to our 50 gram bright fit let's turn it back on it auto shut off after three minutes like I mentioned this one also reads two point zero two grains so 20.00 here's the thing I think everyone should own a set of check weights this is the Lyman check weight set I'll have links for everything I'm talking about down in the description and probably I'll pin a comment these are not cheap tell you what let me see what the current price is yeah they actually have two kits now I've got the old kit that comes in a little thing like this and they've got a newer set that comes with a little plastic looks like a little miniature ammo box almost and this kit right now is 32 bucks and the new kit is 38 bucks so not cheap but I'm telling you I think everybody should own them so there was 20 grains here's here's another 20 s to make 40 yeah got it good a little bit sideways using tweezers because point zero two grains is about the weight of a fingerprint I wiped all of these down with 99% isopropyl alcohol and wiped my tweezers down and even wiped my fingers down cuz the tiniest little thing can make a difference forty-seven should be fifty seven fifty nine fifty nine point five and sixty point five now you see mine like this would be basically sixty point six right so this one's reading a tenth high so this one might need a little bit more warm up and a calibration to get the numbers right that's one thing I'll say all of the scales I've got are all every single one of them is accurate there's not one I can show you that we're gonna reads two tenths off or something like that if you warm it up if you calibrate it if you make sure you don't have air currents air currents make a huge deal your scale is gonna be affected by the slightest amount of moving air I've had some that read a little bit wonky when the batteries start getting low the I've noticed pretty much all of these are not good at alerting you of low battery I usually noticed like the backlight is a little dimmer than it should be and the scale might start reading a little bit wonky fresh batteries and everything's back to normal another thing that affects the scale a ton is vibrations which is why I love this I've got a rubber mat on my bench that really helps to insulate those vibrations another thing is electrical interference like if you've got fluorescent lighting above your bench or you're just close to other electronics you have to always keep that in mind as well luckily I've got fluorescent lights above my bench they've never given me any problems whatsoever so I'll tell you what we've had this guy up and running here let's run it through a calibration real quick and then we'll run back through the check lights and see if it still reads a little bit high I think we press and hold the unit's button come up comes up and says Cal and then says 50 so we need a 50 gram check wait pass and it reads 50 so that's a 50 gram check wait here's a 20 perfect and here's a 10 perfect so let's switch back over to grains which on this scale is five clicks so let's start small and work our way up because a lot of these scales are a lot of scales in general I've got a hard time picking up tiny things they want to be at zero and this scale in particular is one of the very worst at coming off of zero and starting to give you actual readings it's something I've complained about for a long time but the problem is all of these scales have the problem to some degree or another and I've just got to learn to live with it I guess so let's take that half grain or off and now look it's screwed up our zero so let's hit tare here's a one Graner let's see if it can get that guy yeah the one Greiner was mostly okay here's two more this should take us to five this should take us to ten this should take us to twenty forty sixty and sixty point five perfect so a little bit of warmup time running through a calibration and we're right on the money now one thing this this scales a little bit snappier like it gives you the reading a little bit quicker than like this guy and I'm not sure if it'll come across on camera but hopefully like this one you see it counting up for a split second before you actually get your reading yeah there it is but it's still not too bad and that one's just a little bit snappier so this one pretty accurate pretty snappy the ergonomics of it are good like it's not too tall you can slide a trickler over it no problem and have plenty of room for even your biggest pans yeah so it's pretty good and did I mention this one's 1699 right so 1699 versus 45 bucks versus 35 bucks I'll tell you this this scale here reminds me a lot of this scale if you remember it yeah one of these it's got the little adjustable feet I did find one seller still selling these on Amazon but they've become pretty hard to find this was a little confusing because when I bought this one it read 2.02 grains and then a lot of viewers were buying them and they were reading 2.1 grains it's fresh it's frustrating you never know what you're gonna get and they rarely include information that's specific for real odors that was actually the reason why I first bought this one is because this is the first one I saw that was specifically aimed at real odors it came with a pan that was useful so it was a little bit more expensive but I thought hey you know we're finally being recognized as a group of consumers here by these Amazon sellers and if you go to the True Way website they actually have a whole section where they talk about their scales for reloading so I also bought this one the real odor sharpshooter now this one comes in a nice plastic case like you know it's not exactly a pelican case but it's a nice yeah nice plastic case just about as nice as the ones that come with most pistols and this one comes with a little rubber mat they call it an anti vibration mat look at that real odor sharpshooter and then in here you get a scale a pan the batteries you can how to store some spare batteries and it came with batteries and then some calibration weights and some little plastic tweezers this scale is crazy expensive 84 dollars I do not recommend this scale the price alone makes it really quite ridiculous but it's got some other minor problems as well one good thing is you can disable the auto off like this one I think you press knob this is wrong I'm going into calibration yep I'm an idiot let me turn this off turn it back on yeah we press and hold tare and right now you see that it shows zero if I hit the mode button and scroll through that is you can do a 60 second 120 second 180 second auto off or if you set it to zero it'll never shut off and then you click OK and it says pass and then shuts off and now this one will stay on forever the main reason I bought this was well I had already bought the marksman and was like in it and I noticed that this had a feature I was specifically asking for and in that it reads 2.05 instead of point zero two it's point zero five increments so if we throw yeah let's start with a five grain check late let's see if we can get it to read 0.5 off no there's seven here's nine it's trying here's 10 oops all right we'll get that one later just point five nine okay let's try that bang it let's put it way out here to the side maybe we'll get a little bit error nope nineteen point five twenty thirty nine point five mm-hmm almost fifty nine point five okay I can't get the stupid thing to read off right there we go finally so I've got fifty nine grain of Czech weight saying well at least there for a little bit it was reading fifty nine point zero five that is extremely useful because these scales like the load sensors in them and stuff they're just not quite good enough to give you reliable readings down to point zero two grains so let me grab the tin tin green check wait so there there's that when you see cows bouncing around a little bit 10.04 if we lift it up set it back down on their ten point zero two now it's nine point nine eight ten point zero two you see like the scales are just not precise enough for Oh point zero two so this is why it's useful it is absolutely useful you kind of need to know that it's a little bit twitchy where I always thought that if they went to point zero five instead it would make for a scale that was a little bit less crazy and prone to giving you bouncing readings and stuff like that so this scale is good if you've got one congratulations you bought a pretty darn good scale I love the point zero five increments but it's it's not worth eighty four ninety-nine it's not worth eighty five bucks so let's not spend any more time talking about it this is also this is a 20 gram scale which it actually shows you the max in grains is three hundred and eight point six five grains that's you know that's fine for what we need in reloading the vast majority of the time but I found that you know the 20 gram scales you've got to be a little bit more delicate with their you know load sensors because like the Sharpshooter or I'm sorry the marksman this is a 100 gram scale so five more times it just feels like the loads the load sensor is a little bit beefier but at the same time it reads very accurately 2.1 grains no problem whatsoever all right here's one thing that's kind of annoying this thing did turn itself off and that auto off feature where you can disable the auto off you have to do that every single time you turn it on so if I've just turned this on and I'm about to get reloading here in a few minutes and I want to warm up my scale for a little bit push and hold mode it says auto off and now we're good to go so while the reloader sharpshooter has a setting that sticks this guy does not now to finish out the true way line up this is another scale I bought and hopefully you'll immediately see one of the major problems the area right here at the display is rounded it the glare is awful and let me flip it on here it's extremely hard to read not just on camera but in person as well I really really hate it the other big problem with this one is that it's also expensive it's fifty eight ninety nine so fifty nine dollars it has a hundred and eighty second auto off three-minute auto off and you can't disable it the display really sucks so this one's I definitely don't buy this one either but I'll tell you what it's really great at is that this is probably the snappiest fastest registering scale that I tried like the number comes up immediately just very very snappy and it's unfortunate that you can't disable the auto off so this exact same scale with the ability to turn off the auto plus a little less glare on the screen would be a pretty good one but hey it would still be 60 freakin dollars and that's too much for us that it does have the adjustable feet whatever so that's it that's the the complete true weigh lineup that I tested yeah there we are can't really fit them all in there right now a little bit pricier but all of these function really well so let me move on to the rest of the bright fit lineup that I bought you can see this what was it a 50-50 gram version pretty darn good well this was the first one I bought and it is a 20 gram scale that looks pretty much identical to the very expensive sharpshooter right very similar so remember sharpshooter $85 this guy $17.99 so let's flip this dude on one of my favorite things press and hold mode and there's our zero or I'm sorry that was tare so press and hold tear this one gives us the same and then I accidentally turned it off I press and hold terror we get the zero and if we hit the mode button it cycles through that same 60 120 180 and zero options and that's a permanent setting so this guy will never turn off and he'll the batteries run dead this thing is twitchy like I've mentioned earlier about the the 20 gram scales like this is a very sensitive load cell it seems like I'm always they feel fragile to me the 20 grain errs or the 20 gram models but this one kind of reads a little bit all over the place like here's the 5 it reads perfect lift it up set it back down mounts 5.0 4 this one is probably the worst of any I'm going to show you today about just kind of reading all over the place I think now I just turned this one on and I haven't had it on in several hours so there's some warm-up that needs to be going on right now I found the best performance with this one when I fired it up and let it sit for 30 minutes at least before I used it and this one I also found like if you go up to the edges let's see how how it acts for me here so it reads a little bit light on that side and if we go over to the opposite corner it reads a little bit heavy and I consistently found that it you know it kind of reads a little bit wonky out towards the corners and they do even mention up right up here is to place objects in the center and it's even got the little circle there to guide you so this was the first one I bought from this company and whenever I kind of played with it a little bit and found that it was very twitchy and like yeah if we just sit here watching this number it's gonna bounce all over the place just from like the you know the vibrations from my voice I've got the furnace turned off you know but there's still a little bit of air moving in here or you know a little bit of vibration in the table so this one was just a little bit too twitchy and I definitely don't recommend it it's it's frustrating when you know the number is constantly changing on you so the next thing I bought so that was the twenty grant Graham version this was the 50 this is the one we've already looked at that I like and I also bought a 100 gram version and a 200 gram version these are all about 15 bucks apiece what I was hoping is that as I went up we would find one that read in point one grain increments cuz I really do prefer that for a general-purpose scale until they start giving us point zero five well let me let me flip this way this one I don't have batteries in I guess whatever uh hang on all right there we go so these also just like the last one showed you they do have the ability to turn off the auto off but these are immediately useless to us here's the I'll tell you what let's start out with a five five grain check wait and let's put on the point five they reach five point six so let's try that again over here on this guy there's the five five point six so there's one more grain six point four these read in point two increments so it can't read six point five it can't read five point five it always rounds it to 0.4 or 0.6 so these are totally and utterly useless we need at least point one grains so that was extremely disappointing I had high hopes for these two thinking they were going to be a less twitchy version of that one I showed you previously but they're totally useless it's a waste of thirty bucks but it had to be done so bright fit two of them that are totally useless because they read and point to grains one of them that is just way too freakin twitchy and gives readings that constantly erratic but as I've already shown you this one was pretty darn good so if you go with the bright fit this is the one you want so far it's doing a good job so the operation of this one really reminds me of these two that we talked about a little bit a minute ago the seller I bought this one off of isn't selling them anymore of it this Homme geek or home geek brand is still available if you like the ergonomics of tell you what let's just get this one out of the way it's not even available anymore not to be confused with this other one that's not available anymore yeah so if you prefer the ergonomics of this over this like this is kind of a interchangeable choice they seem to work pretty close to one another this also has a three minute auto OAuth and some people find that they can adjust it like let's press and hold tear and on my home geek nothing happens but some people get the 60 120 180 option but there's no zero available yeah if I go back to my original press and hold terror you'll see it does it gives me the 180 60 120 180 there's just no 0 30 60 120 180 there's just no zero available so three minutes is the best you can get with these so if you remember whatever we were using the 0.5 grain check weight and this one over here doesn't it well now it registered at that time but you guys saw earlier that it didn't it's very sticky at zero air went so it's not gonna pick that up and then you take it off and now your zero is screwed up these are not quite so bad and these are a little bit snappier you get readings a little bit faster and it'll reliably pick up this point 5 Greiner all day long and doesn't screw up your zero and I used to make a really big deal out of this and I've just decided that I'm not gonna be able to do that anymore because if I grab a trickler there we go this trick lers got some CFE 2:23 in it it's a very very fine powder that is easy to trickle slowly tell you what this is another thing I probably should have mentioned about the scales like these clamshell yeah like these clamshell style it's terrible for trickling right like your pans way over here you basically needed to trickle with your left hand so just organ ah mcli speaking these type like the reloader sharpshooter and the bride fit ones are pain to blood but this one looks great and if we tear it to zero this is where like this one you can go really fast to be honest like we can trickle out powder just about as fast as we can and it's not going to pick up any of it I could continue this all day so the scale is basically just constantly Reesie rowing itself and skills have to have a little bit of this because well otherwise you end up with like that the orange one here that I was calling twitchy where it's constantly floating around and it's not automatically compensating for temperature changes or slight drafts or anything like that where this one it's trying too hard to stay at zero so this is just terrible yeah we drifted that guy by six point six screams pretty much any scale on the table will do that this is the worst like most of you have to you have to trickle really slow to get it to not pick it up but pretty much all of them can be fooled so if you're ever measuring extremely small things or trying to trickle from nothing you really need did not do that you got to get some weight on there because here's what we do let's take a this is a five grain check late there we go it reads 5.0 for now let's trickle slowly and see what it does look at that picking it right up so it's only a problem when it's at zero a scale at zero wants to stay at zero but once you get it off of there it's generally pretty good now I went through every scale I've got with this test and I started with five and I'd slowly trickled it up to seven let me do that here so I'm doing this slow like over about a two minute window now one of the problems is a lot of the skills that automatically shut themselves off like this will auto shut off while you're doing this like for some reason these small changes don't reset the auto off alright so they're there seven grains empty out or powder charge and we'll see it returned to zero so all that slow trickling did not screw up at zero as long as I started from you know some amount of weight like with starting with five grains so there are a couple more scales that I haven't mentioned well first here's this one right here there are still a couple sellers on Amazon selling this one this is really the only one I found that failed the slow trickle test from five grains so there you can see I've got three or four tenths of powder in the pan already and it's not registering all of the others were fine whenever I did that but this one it was very easy to get it to screw up so already in the past I've told people to avoid this scale and I would if you liked this form factor go with one of the ones with the buttons straight across like that I think you'll be better off a couple of them from the reloading company so this is the little Lyman pocket Touch 1500 got fancy little touchscreen and I don't have a lot to say negative about this guy it's done pretty decent job and it's got that old you know the the hinging cover like the old Frankfort Arsenal that everybody seemed to have you know it's it's very similar to that one and it works yeah it works halfway decent it is like it's a reasonably snappy scale you know you get a reading pretty quick but it does kind of bounce around a little bit this is one where at that time it reads 6.9 but if I pick it up and set it back down yeah it's gonna make a liar out of me let's try that again yep it's gonna work perfectly now there's nine there's twenty nine there's 49 yeah it's really behaving itself well right now so the linemen might not be a terrible option for you it does like I mentioned it's got a five-minute auto off which is good five minutes is about enough it reads 2.1 grain increments which i like and these are the kits i think 23 bucks right now the problem though is that it does come with this powder pan and these these are okay i guess but not really there are a little bit of a pain in the butt i prefer the ones like this or ones like this if you have an old beam scale these gold color ones used to come with be much the beam scales but if you want to just buy that pan these are like 25 or 30 bucks if you can find them anywhere in stock so so not much to complain about with the Lyman next is the hornet eg2 1500 and this scale and like that Lyman these are what they're selling in their press kits I think for the most part so you may end up with one of these whether you wanted it or not my biggest complaint about the Hornady is that it is the most sluggish scale I've got on the table here like you put something on there it really takes it a long time to settle down and give you your reading like it's not the worst thing in the world you could certainly get used to it but if you're used to one that's a little snappier it can it can be annoying so here's 57 59 60 and sixty point five and this one kind of like I was mentioning with the Lyman you noticed several times there it was reading a tenth off whenever I put stuff on there there you go that's fifty point six or at least it showed it for a second and I haven't really given this one enough time to warm up here for this test but although I mean it's it's not bad it's accurate I wish that display just wasn't quite as sluggish but otherwise it's a perfectly usable scale and like I mentioned earlier with the trickle test it works fine as long as you're not starting from zero so I just have to like personally get over that sticky zero problem because its present in pretty much every single scale and it's just something we've gotta understand so I think this is the last one this is overall this is the gem 20 from smart way on Amazon this one is terrible because it has a 60 second auto off and I haven't found any way to change it so I'm not even to a power of the stupid thing on 60 seconds is annoying as crap your scale will constantly be turning itself off that is one bad thing about the Hornady that i forgot to mention this guy's got a hundred and twenty second auto off so two minutes yeah it's kind of annoying especially when I'm kind of used to the three minutes with this one that I've been using a long time like I've just gotten used to the stupid thing staying on for three minutes and the Hornady always seems to be off whenever I need it to be on so I think that pretty much covers it so back to my three recommendations being able to disable that auto off on these is huge I love it freaking love it the form factor kind of sucks I really don't like the lid it's a little bit of a pain in the butt to get off but I found these to be good scales I've done a fair amount of loading with both of them and they did pretty good I've only had this one here about 10 or 12 days so I've not got quite as much experience with it so I'm gonna try and use it quite a bit and if I find something bad about it I'll make another frickin video and let you guys know there are also a couple more scales I want to buy so if any of those is fantastic I'll make another video as well and if these were just a little bit cheaper if this stupid thing was 20 bucks instead of 35 right now it would be an easy choice I think and hopefully that price goes back down like I mentioned it just went back up over the last couple months but it was 20 bucks for a long time and hopefully it'll go back to that I don't know we'll see I'll tell you one thing about this bright fit company that makes this scale their listings are ridiculous for all of their different scales they've got three different listings it seems like one of them says like 20 19 new version and then the others updated version then there's one like 20 20 version so what I'm afraid of as we get out and buy some of these to play around with we're gonna find that you know kind of like kind of like these old things there's multiple versions out there that look exactly the same and some work better than others so if you happen to pick up one of these be sure to come back let us know in the comments whether it's working well for you and like I said I have tons of links in the description if you want to make sure you're buying the exact same listing that I bought so I think that's where we'll leave it folks see you guys next time

Channel: Johnny's Reloading Bench

Views: 30,015

Rating: 4.9449735 out of 5

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Id: X1b4wVB062c

Length: 36min 3sec (2163 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 08 2019