The first one we bought (Salter 1002.jpg, $69 locally) has a cool-looking glass platform, four load-cell/strain gauge sensors, and a resolution of 2 g from 0 to 5000 g. It is also slow to respond, and has excess hysteresis, on the order of 4 g. I tested it with some calibration weights and it was reasonably accurate, not exceeding 5% error with any of my weights (5 g through 1 kg).
However, for kitchen use it worked fine, until I dropped a full jar of peanut butter on it and busted one of the aluminum load cells (although the glass platform survived).
Then we bought another (Salter 2001.jpg, $36 on the web). It is not nearly as cool looking, but has a resolution of 1 g from 0 to 2000 g, and 2 g from 2000 to 5000 g, is faster to respond, has very low hysteresis (< 1 g, perhaps a bit too low), and was never off by more than 1% with any of my calibration weights. I haven't been allowed to disassemble it (haven't broken it yet), but my guess is there are probably three strain bridge load cells under the platform.
The other interesting thing: average-size almonds weigh very close to 1 g each. I was measuring 30 g of them, then counted them: 29. I tried it five more times from a bag of Blue Diamond roasted almonds: 30,32,32,30,31.
Jim Elwell, CAMS Electrical Engineer Industrial manufacturing manager Salt Lake City, Utah, USA www.qsicorp.com
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