You might not want to know.
Lol, yeah. Anywho, mine did finally get here, just in time for Christmas. I'm really surprised by how small it is, the pictures and stuff really don't do it justice.
(Note: Click on any of these pictures for the hi-res versions.)Display is nice overall, but the optimal viewing angle is strange. Looking at it from an underneath angle (\---) is gorgeous, but from an angle above it (/---) the contrast degrades. It's certainly not illegible, but not something I saw in the AN8008 review.
The battery compartment has just a
tad more space between the springs and negative terminals than I'd prefer, but there's plenty of force on there (for now).
The red "multi-purpose lead" (for the screw-on attachments) had a minor casting issue on the ends, but simple enough to file off. Whatever. I didn't buy it for these leads, however I do find them to be really handy.
On the topic of test leads:
- I noticed that the screw-attachment leads don't pick up as much noise/coupling, despite being longer than the standard test leads. It's much easier to induce noise floating on the mV range by waving around the regular leads than the attachment ones.
- The temperature probe is a big thumbs-down for me! I would really prefer the usual little wire than this weird probe thing. I was tempted to stick this one under my tongue, but who knows what it's really made out of!
As far as I can tell the measurements are well within spec, but I don't have anything to properly compare it to. This blows my old multimeters out of the water. For $20 I think it was definitely worth it, the last time I bought a multimeter something like this would've cost 10 times as much.
I won't post any tear-down photos,
lygte-info.dk has that covered pretty good. One thing I noticed from those photos is they (usually) put the value of components on the silkscreen, that's a nice touch. No guessing what a cap is if you ever need to change it, etc.
I will probably whack in some different bypass capacitance like others have done on the AN8008. The old 100uF electrolytic does seem insufficient. I will probably leave the voltage reference alone though.