EEVblog 1378 - NEW Uni-T UT61E+ Multimeter - Still bang-per-buck king?

hi this is the vendorable unity ut61e multimeter not to be confused with the 61 a b c and d models they're all very different anyway the ut61e was probably one of the best bang per buck meters like under 60 yankee bucks in terms of general features uh accuracy and uh performance and the fact that it had a 22 000 i count uh display it'll be better than your usual uh 5 000 or 6 000 count meters in this uh price range so yeah i've recommended this one for years a lot of people recommend it as you know a good meter under that price point it's got our rs232r optical interface uh as well of course it never really had a good reputation if you wanted a uh you know a robust safe meter for like high energy or mains measurements um this really wasn't the meter uh for you but you know for a general purpose electronics meter it was pretty hard to beat for like under 60 yankee bucks anyway what they've gone and done is ta-da they've introduced a new meter here it is the scene they've called it exactly the same the 61e plus and as you can see it's a little bit bigger it's got a bigger display it's got a couple of extra features and stuff like that whereas this one was sub 60 us dollars this one's now about 88 us dollars so it's substantially more expensive is it worth the upgrade well let's take a look at it so the old one was actually you know a nice little sort of ruggedy uh thing you know it just looks and feels kind of like you know a little brick this one feels ah mace only a smidgen less rugged but i i don't think there's anything in it really it's probably my imagination and as far as dropping them goes both of them are the range switches are exposed like that and yeah it's still uh exposed they're probably not as much because this actually does have the raised rubber around there which is improvement over the previous design so yeah that's worthwhile upgrade one of the significant upgrades uh comes in terms of uh the battery well for a lot of people uh anyway so you take this off and we've got four uh triple a's instead of the nine volt we had before i know there's a lot of fun nine volt fan boys out there but i think um you'll find that the majority think uh that going to triple a's would be a positive anyway yet they've got a captive metal uh threaded screw they're nice we've got the same a usb uh interface that we had before although we'll look at the teardown it's actually got a transmitter and a receiver um in this uh whereas the only one had a transmitter and curiously we've got a threaded insert on the back what it's like is that like a tripod mount well my smallest tripod mount doesn't really fit and neither does my large one so i'm down well okay someone's going to find that useful i guess so definitely one of the benefits of the new model is that you can access the fuses you don't have to screw off the case like you had to on the previous e model nice so the annoying thing about these uh bs 1362 fuses is that they're not the same length as your regular uh high voltage thousand volt multimeter fuses so um in theory you're not supposed to or you can't actually replace them with a higher voltage fuses you're stuck with the 250 volts unless you can find one in that size in a thousand volt range i don't know leave it in the comments i don't know offhand like it's probably neither here nor there once again like if you're buying this meter you're not buying it for its like huge thousand volt input uh fuse rating right you're just buying it for its bang per buck and stuff like that so as long as it's got the uh ceramic fuses in there you're good to go all right let's see if we can uh crack one of these fuses open see what's in there well there we go oh that was fun um it is filled with sand it's filled with stars so that's what you want and it is filled sand filled so yeah they haven't skimped there it's not some fakie okay one of the huge differences of course is the display here they've gone from 13 millimeter digits to big ass 20 millimeter ones and well yeah that is very nice uh much bigger count here on the bar graph whereas before it was a tiny little font you could barely read it in there so yeah that's a big improvement for not much more in height the new model does sit uh substantially higher than the previous one only because it's got the uh probe holders on the bottom you either like those or you don't now you can see the difference between the two meters the uh older one does actually uh tilt back a little bit more but because i'm getting a bit of glare there i'll just move that uh forward they both have uh you know really good uh tilting bales on them nice and wide at the bottom there's a smidgen ah thicker and well a fair stands up a fair bit uh higher at the top side here given that the holders are on there they've got exactly the same usb interface but as we'll see in the tear down this one actually has a receiver and this one doesn't it's just a fakie it's only got a transmit lead they've changed the arrangement of the input jacks here instead of the straight arrangement like this they've actually staggered them it's neither here nor their rating is exactly the same cat for 600 volts cat 3 a thousand volts but as we'll see in the teardown the input protection isn't as good as uh you know properly designed meters but as they say on here it's only uh 250 volt rated and they only have 250 volt rated fuses in there this one actually claims uh 20 amps max as opposed to 10 amps max here so they're probably upgraded the input shunts and or connections and i've got to say at this angle um the new display is uh you know easier to read than what it was before at this back angle oh there's not much in it maybe the fact that these are bigger slightly better maybe at an angle yeah it's well it's definitely as well as being bigger it is an improved display for sure button arrangement is slightly different rel and peak are in the same place except they actually have min max written on it but it had min max uh before hold is in the same place selectors in the same place different shape buttons but now it has a backlight yay um yeah it's not great is it geez even if i turn off all my studio lights here yeah it's you know it looks okay on camera but it's actually pretty piss week and the range switch here well it is uh significantly changed i do actually like uh the new styling with the uh like you know the raised rubber around here and i do like the rubber feel on the range switch the range switch feels very similar it's got to be the same mechanism really so yeah but i just like the rubber baby buggy bumpers on there i think that's a nice touch and the font is nice and bigger you know it's larger you can really see it you know big bold fonts and you know it really is quite nice so styling wise it is actually a much better uh meter but now we've actually got separate uh ac volts and dc volt switch positions and you'll either like that or you won't but there's actually reasons for that is because uh you can then do auto ranging better on ac signals in the presence of dc signals and stuff like that so anyway i won't go into details on that but it is better and they do have uh separate millivolt uh ranges like that we've got ohms uh diode continuity but the capacitance is on here whereas we had our capacitance separately before and they have hertz exactly are the same the same resolution um but here is to for my mind like the big what the fail on this thing hfe transistor measurement why uh well like i know that the uh this ut 60 series actually had a model with i think it was the like the a or the d or something had like the transistor tested but it shows they don't understand their target market nobody wants to measure transistor gain anymore and they provide you with the um which they have on i believe it's standard on like other uh models that have the transistor tester this huge big transistor adapter you've got the through-hole uh ones here but you can put like surface mount transistors in there but like yeah okay kind of but no no no no no if your multimeter has a transistor tester in it it's uh it's bordering on a toy it's clearly it's clear that the manufacturer doesn't know what their intended market for this meter is it's just nuts to have that on the e model which is designed to like be a replacement for this no i know if you don't want to use it just ignore it but no they wasted a switch position on it and just the inclusion of it just rubs me the wrong way and a huge oversight especially when you start talking near 90 us dollars is the lack of temperature measurement if this thing had a temperature measurement instead of the hfe i probably would have upgraded my vertex of this thing saying oh it's probably a reasonable upgrade but because it doesn't have temperature it's got a useless transistor tester eyes no no no anyway uh current ranges are all are still the same but we have a non-contact voltage detection now beauty all right so let's compare it to one of the best uh ef built-in ef detection meters on the market the new bm786 has got two ranges that defaults to the high so let's just try the high first and uh the non-contact uh detection is the little tab is on the side here so let's put just a non-loaded mains up there we go one bar two bars okay no worries and the unity um yeah um bueller bueller oh we got one only because i was moving it like no no that's just no that's that's a fail and even if i set it to low range here we're still actually going to get it hang on i was able to get it oh geez it's gotta be really close don't know what's going on before but oh geez and the red trying to match the red up there that's uh the red case um no so it does kinda sort of work thing one bar two bars three bars i just like but yeah no it's it's not very good bribeman will detect the light switch this one won't detect anything not a thing not so you get a rather large case for it here with the probes and they claim that these are gold plated probes um ah they're yeah your regular pvc they're not uh silicones but you don't expect that but yeah gold plated probes this time they make a deal out of that and you get the usb adapter for it as well but i won't be trying the usb uh software in this let's do the ohms auto range in here that's pretty quick yep yep that's pretty decent continuity buzzer oh yeah yeah that's what i'm talking about latched and fast doesn't miss a trick it's pretty loud too just notice something check this out i've got a magnet here because i've been talking about the uh make now look look look it goes into serial mode does that mean that there's a magnet in this puppy and it shifts into serial mode is that a thing so yeah if i slide that in it's got some sort of detection because there's like there's no signal it's an optical uh thing anyway i think that's kind of cute anyway it does um even though super fast continuity does actually have visual continuity but that takes time to kick in it doesn't flash looks like it's coming from the reading instead of the buzzer circuit now that is a real large design oversight i mean you're obviously switching on the buzzer when you switch on the buzzer you should switch on the light that'd be like ah maybe they can just simply change that in software that'd be like you guys you can't upgrade the software in this as far as i know um but you know maybe they can make that change and uh future revisions can have that because that's a you know it's nice to have the visual continuity there but no they've just completely screwed that because they're basing it on the visual display it's it's probably a couple of lines of code now just ignore that uh bar graph at the moment um it does seem to be fast updating like the other one but i'm feeding in a triangle wave at 20 hertz at the moment and you can see that we're getting that on the display no worries it should read about zero because that's its uh average value i put in here and um no we're not seeing it why is the bar graph up to there when it's 0.08 that does not seem good so the new bar graph seems to be improved so if i change that to 10 hertz there actually seems to be kind of like some artifact business going on there and like no digits there it's interesting i mean this is a proper triangle wave so i should spend the same amount of time in each uh position the old display what's happening to the bar graph there it's not going anywhere you can see it in there but the bar graph ain't keeping up so new bar graph is much quicker okay it's only if we go down to five hertz that we actually start to get there you go it goes up to near the plus hundred millivolts that i'm actually feeding into this thing yeah it's kind of like it just flickers everything but at least it flickers and tells you something's changing whereas the previous one didn't do it at all okay let's do some spot checks uh take these with a grain of salt of course because we only got a sample size of one but yeah substantially closer on the newy yeah again at two volts uh substantially closer tighter let's actually see what it goes up to shall we i mean it's supposed to be 2200 count will it go to 23. no no 2.2 let's go up yeah there we go so 2.22 it uh rolled over will they roll back the same there you go the new one actually rolled back and this one didn't so there's slight differences in their thresholds for uh ranging let's go negative a little bit different oh that one didn't arrange properly look at that that's an improvement looks like maybe there's an improvement in some range in there perhaps no there we go it's done at this time a little bit closer there on current at uh the lower part of the range let's go up to ten oh yeah same 100 milliamps though significantly uh different both of them actually but then again like it's still well within our spec it's got like half a percent spec just go negative there there you go yeah it does change a bit boohoo it's a little bit out on resistance but you know still with inspect and it's a fair bit out on my reference cap but once again uh you know it's like three percent tolerance or something so it's still within spec let's measure the current consumption shall we nine milliamps there you go in dc volt that's not the lowest thing out there whereas let's measure the previous one with its 9-volt battery 2.4 milliamps hmm i'll have to run the old confuser and get back to you on that which one's better okay let's see if it'll support mains up the clacker there we go and we'll do the old switchy millivolts ohms yep hurts hfe beta there it is yep and non-contact voltage detection boom switch it off seems to still work yeah no worries still works geez that's a bit out isn't it that's supposed to be my 10k maybe i need to uh let it cool down a bit yeah yeah it's got i think it's going to go back up it's just eaten up yeah no worries everything still works so while they're not silicone they are actually uh labeled and raided 16 awg all wishing let's chop it okay let's see what we get for our dollar edu's they are quite thick so that's oh yeah yeah yeah that looks good i'm liking that oh yeah look at that how many strand is that don't know but it's a lot and that's what you want to see because the more strands the better the uh flexibility and uh the more the longer life you're gonna get so yeah that's pretty good you are getting yourself a lot of copper in there for your dollar-y dues all right let's have a brief comparison of the pcb with the uh original one and see what's different really now i do have high-res tear down photos of this over on the eev blog flickr account so check that out if you want to see it now here's the basic uh differences the first thing is that the input jacks on the previous version they were like these split input jacks the new ones actually have solid jacks like this very nice which then uh screw in so that's a really good upgrade right there i like that now as far as the input protection goes they have really are beefed it up before we only had two ptc's here and no moths at all uh to speak of now of course the ut61e was uh never recommended for its uh input protection and stuff like that it's just for its uh bang per park so they have actually uh improved it there no less than four ptc's and three mobs you might think that's great well okay but where's the input protection resistor there's actually nothing like usually they have a high voltage r surge resistor in series with the uh ptcs because how the ptcs work is that they're a low resistance value and they only i go up in resistance uh when they actually heat up and that takes time so the initial surge current if you get like an over voltage condition and a surge current happens then it's going to be clamped by the moths or maybe the clamp diodes you know somewhere else it depends on the uh can of what's actually doing it the protection there then you're going to get a large in-rush current and the ptcs are going to be low value uh resistance until such time as they have time to heat up so yeah that's not good like most meters on the market uh with any decent input protection will have a high voltage surge input resistor and this just doesn't have it of course the original one uh didn't have it because well there were no were no uh mobs they only had the ptc's but of course you would have the clamp protection uh diodes in here where are they associated with are they over here they're associated with the current i think anyway any clamp protection is reliant upon the ptc to heat up and they haven't changed anything there so yeah they've beefed it up but still for the cost of a series you know surge resistor oh come on anyway you can see the uh like limited amount of our clamping here like in terms of like there's hardly any clamping zener transistors here and well xena configuration i've done a whole video on how these actually uh work i might have to link that one in but look look at all these look at all these back to back uh xena protection uh transistors here anyway they have added in smd uh diode bridge up here that does uh the protection across the uh current uh the current uh fuses or the current input so that is a decent upgrade there now the fuses um they've remained the same type unfortunately now the ones supplied are actually from asia fuse but the problem is is that they're only 240 volt rated and well like no come on we want you know if you want decent input protection you want a thousand volt rating now this is very nice they've actually added i can't get that out of there with a fuse in but anyway there's a cutout in the board there and they've added this little uh plastic uh spacer in here to actually uh separate the range switch contacts from the fuse and that's a very nice touch so i uh checked and yeah sure enough even though they don't have a voltage rating on them yep these are uh 250 volt fuses so meh you know at least they are um you know ceramic jobbies but yeah no like you don't buy this meter for the input protection so the extra money is not going there now there's our input divider resistor network there and it's very nice that they've actually used that it looks like they've used the identical one again now uh ebg that's actually an austrian company so very require reputable they do actually have an asian branch and that's where it would have come from so yeah don't uh you know get all moist thinking that you're getting an austrian input resistor divider network no but still you know it's pretty good like for the price it's pretty good and the rest of the differences i don't think it's neither here nor there of course we've got the non-contactor voltage detection that's that up there happening in the new model which we didn't have on the previous one so on the bottom here won't go into any uh specific changes except for the fact look we had a bunch of melf resistors uh over here don't have those uh these time on the new jobby on the plus model a significantly uh less complex range switch here if you actually uh compare those two but neither here nor there it uses the same brand chipset except they are different significantly uh different we've got an esr51922a here and an es232 2037 here i don't know uh the differences i'm not going to like go into the absolute details here it doesn't matter you can go discuss that on the evblog forum the lcd is implemented differently just had a single row zebra contact at the top we've got dual row here we've got the lead here for the non-contact and that just goes into the little uh light pipe there which goes through the front cover so you can see that they've actually put you know more attention to detail in terms of like the uh high voltage isolation slot here uh and the little uh plastic they went to the effort there look they've got a bigger solder coated extra which means extra uh current trace running from your mobs all the way back to your uh common jack here so that's nice so they've allowed for you know your fault currents to actually go right back to the jack like that whereas before well you didn't hey you didn't have any mobs um did you unless there's a sneaky is there a sneaky mob in there somewhere i don't i don't think so i mean they should be down here but uh yeah basically they have beefed up the protection but like which is okay but you wouldn't like rush out and buy this for its uh protection that's for sure and they've of course gone away from the nine volt uh battery here with the contacts integral to the pcb two uh what i much prefer the uh triple a's and then the holder being in the back and then there's the contacts going down to the board so they've you know improved the battery solution and i know there's some 9 volt fan boys out there but i think the majority of people are going to go yay they're triple a's instead of 9 volts one thing you won't find in the new one is a 10 turn trimmer pot now that was actually used it's marked dc volts down here so presumably you would tweak that for the calibration you've got another pot down here as well for the ac volt calibration and another adjustment pot over here as well and then a couple of trimmer caps down there that would be for the frequency adjustment and another one over here for the capacitance adjust and well i'm not seeing any adjustment pots on the new design at all so yeah they're are they using a like just a better reference uh better divider resistors everything else and that probably lowers their production cost but they are charging 20 bucks more for this remember that one of the interesting things is they only had a transmit led before here for the um serial interface they've now got looks like transmit and receive here so are they doing the you know like software calibration because of the lack of the trimmer pots now they might be doing that via the serial input so if someone can crack that you might be able to do uh the calibration so generally the upgrades here are you know pretty worthwhile i don't think it's worth an extra 20 bucks but you know yeah they've improved things as far as the case goes i really like it i love the shielding around here fantastic and of course the new spring contact battery compartment great stuff and of course you can access the uh fuses terrific and then down in the uh switch part the uni t has always had a uh like a decent feeling switch this one's uh no exception and that's uh thanks to you know a fairly typical uh indent arrangement here but it does feel uh really nice and of course we've got a new input screw jacks instead of like the little stamped uh split ones before so huge improvement there and of course one of the big upgrades for many is that we now have a backlight under the lcd and that's just uh soldered down onto the board there you have to desolder it under there so we'll compare the specs here here's the previous one like just the basic headline specs here um yeah it's increased it was uh point one percent uh dc volts plus two it's now 0.05 percent are plus five so a few more loosey-goosey uh digits on the end but generally an improvement on the uh accuracy dc current is uh basically the same half a percent uh plus 10 digits so no improvement there but it does actually have an improved maximum 20 amps here as you saw on the front whereas uh previously it was only 10 amps so yeah dc resistance uh half a percent plus 10 nothing's changed and it's got the same uh frequency response up to 10 gigahertz uh true rms as the previous one did so yeah so there's been a slight improvement in dc voltage spec but basically everything else is pretty much uh identical really so it's it's nothing to write home to your mum about so i won't go into any more detail on this i'll cut it short there if you want me to do any specific tests i can actually do it so what's my verdict on the new uh plus model well yeah it's an improved meter definitely no question over uh the original e model i mean you know some nice extra features like the bigger display the faster responding bar graph it does have some extra features on there hfc wankway and the non-contact uh voltage detection it's got increased uh 20 milliamps it's uh using new uh triple a's you can access uh the fuses now uh so that's all good the stud might be uh handy for some people and it's got better styling and stuff and you know some people might like the probe holders in the back and things like that but the problem is is that the original e model its major appeal was the fact that it was like 22 000 counts which hasn't changed it's exactly the same but it was its price point it was like under sixty dollars and now they've increased that by practically fifty percent more and it's pushing closer to ninety dollars now and for that money you're not even getting like an extra temperature measurement as i said if it probably had temperature measurement instead of hfe i reckon they could have charged you know a little bit extra for it maybe not uh 50 but yeah there's just not enough there maybe if it went to 50 000 counts you might argue well you know hey that's a bit of a fantastic thing because you know if you're measuring 5 volts or 3.3 volts you're not going to get the extra digit over a 5 000 or 6 000 count meter so 22 000 count is handy but if you're measuring anything over 2.2 it's going to be the same resolution so yeah i think uh most of the appeal of the original one is gone because this price point just uh means that there's extra competition and um leave it in the comments down below i haven't actually uh seen the meter but uh the new aiming 870 uh series is half the cost of this it's in the 40 bracket and it's also 20 000 counts with a similar feature set and it has temperature as well so yeah let me know if you want to uh maybe that'll be a decent uh shootout is this one worth you know almost 12 like twice as much as say the aiming uh one which is a similar 22 000 count meters so yeah i think most of the appeal there is um pretty much gone i don't know leave your thoughts down in the comments down below i'm probably going to give it a thumbs sideways because it's not a thumbs down it's you know it's still a decent meter but like it it doesn't represent the same value as the original 61e offered i don't think and in terms of uh bang per buck compared to the old one i you've probably got to give it a thumbs down because this one is still vastly i think vastly better value than this even though this is a bit nicer i wouldn't really want to pay 50 more for this over the 61e and it's a bit of shame yeah it's an improved design uh you know and it's still decent build quality and it's going to be a fine meter but yeah nah anyway leave your thoughts down below everyone's requirements is different let us know do you think oh yeah i'm going to upgrade my 61e to this beauty um and you know my extra money's worth it or do you go well no there's other competition at this uh sort of price point let us know anyway hope you enjoyed that if you did give it a big a thumbs up as always discuss down below and of course the ev blog forum is the place to discuss test equipment catch you next time you

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 98,124

Rating: 4.9011927 out of 5

Keywords: eevblog, video, multimeter, review, multimeter review, uni-t, ut61e multimeter, ut61e plus, ut61e review

Id: ZxzQZFRznp0

Length: 29min 46sec (1786 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021