Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a great kitchen scale. I have to weigh a lot of meat for homemade sausage. I've never had a scale that would weigh more than about three pounds of kitchen ingredients, so I'm really happy with this scale. I've weighed over ten pounds of meat (plus about a pound of tare for the bowl). That's probably the most I can fit in a steel kitchen bowl without the bowl getting wobbly and tippy. The scale is actually sensitive enough that the numbers start to fluctuate as the bowl gets unbalanced. ____________________________ I LOVE: * I bought this on sale ($12), so I love the price. * I love the simple means of zeroing out the tare. You can either put your bowl on the scale before you turn it on and it will subtract the weight of the bowl to start at zero pounds, or you can turn it on, place the bowl on the scale, and press the on/off/tare button to zero it out. * It's simple to cycle through the units of measure: gram, kilo, ounce, or pound. Very cool! * I don't know if it does this for every unit of measure, but when weighing pounds, the readout is precise to three (or maybe four--I forget) decimal places. That's almost too much information, but it shows me when the tare is off and shows me when the bowl is unbalanced and rocking. ____________________________ I DON'T LOVE: * The picture makes it look like the base is brushed metal. It's not. It's very flimsy plastic. I doubt it will last more than a few years. * It's hard to turn it off. I guess you're supposed to just leave it on and let it turn itself off. This leads to my next gripe. * If it automatically times out and shuts itself off, you have to dump out all of your ingredients and start over. This happened twice while I was trimming meat. I dropped the finished meat in the bowl as I trimmed it. But if I waited too long it would timeout and turn itself off. If I turned it back on, it would assume that the whole bowl of meat was tare and zero out. So I had to dump out all the meat and reset the tare. After this happened twice, I just bounced the bowl occasionally if I hadn't dropped anything in recently. I know a kitchen scale isn't much to get excited about, but I really like this one. I'm just sad that I know it won't last very long. EDIT (May 2014): This scale is still going strong after nearly four years. My initial judgement that this scale wouldn't last was obviously hasty. This thing is a champ. EDIT (April 2015): Still working as well as the day I bought it.