LOVE LOVE LOVE my Salter aquatronic scale. I could not do without it. And it was like $40 bucks. Just be sure to get one that does not use regular batteries, but a TITANIUM long-life battery instead. The ones that use standard batteries die after a few uses, and always at night when you are in the middle of making bread! I learned that the hard way.
OXO for me. I am with Mrs. Wheelbarrow. It weighs up to 5 lbs. and corrects for the container you use to hold what you are measuring. Simple, elegant, easy to clean. Love it!
I have both a Salter (older) and the OXO (recent gift) and I put the Salter away. The battery replacement on the Salter is seriously frustrating, as sdebrango already commented. I give the edge to the OXO because of the pull-out and light features, but honestly, it's a very slight edge.
i like my Salter, though i've never tried anything else. it got high marks from Cook's Illustrated, and was affordable, so I went with that. It is a little stubborn when I want to weigh very low quantities (below 5 grams), but it can tell the difference between 55 and 58 grams. It's just when I am wishing I didn't have to measure out baking soda or salt, for instance. Definitely finding a flat-surface model, so you can put whatever vessel, bowl, etc you are working with directly on the scale and tare it. Congratulations on the scale, once you start using it, you'll never look back! If you're like me, you'll probably start weighing things out for fun, and realize that volume just isn't reliable. Plus, you will start to train your eye to knowing quantities. I find that I'm much faster at taking out specific quantities of an ingredient or judging whether I have enough for the recipe I'm about to do--pretty useful, like a perfect-pitch for cooks. Other recommendations: you won't often know the weights that a cookbook or recipe-writer used to develop the recipe, so you should definitely note what weights you used (and if that seemed accurate with the final results) if you plan to re-visit that recipe or work from that cookbook a lot. King Arthur Flour's baking cookbook is one of the few that I have read that state explicitly what they use for all their recipes, though I do see a trend in the online community to specify weights. Have fun!
I like the OXO too. It is compact and easy to store (save the bottom packaging tray for storage in a drawer or pull out tray). very easy to use. and accurate.
I have a salter digital, its good but when the battery dies (inevitably when you need it) its really frustrating. Going to find am old fashioned scale that doesn't use batteries I think. That said Salter is very good.
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