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Should Handheld multimeters have color LCD displays?

scottiebabe

As I am waiting for my OWON HDS242 to come in the mail, I thought I might ask other members how they feel about a handheld multimeter having a power hungry color LCD display.

The product webpage suggests a battery life of 3-6 hours. https://www.owon.com.hk/products_owon_hds200_series_digital_oscilloscope 

Even more interesting/exciting is the batteries can be recharged with a USB-C cable.

Based on Kerry Wong's teardown: http://www.kerrywong.com/2021/09/18/teardown-of-an-owon-hds272s-3-in-1-handheld-oscilloscope-dmm-awg-compared-with-hantek-2d72/ the multimeter functionality is galvanically isolated from the usb connector.

What do you think?

First time trying the poll feature, hopefully I didn't goof it!

Based on Kerry's notes the meter also has the bones of a real oscilloscope (ADC, FPGA, Sample memory, etc..) How performant is oscilloscope it? I don't know yet.... But I am intrigued!

Update: The scopemeter arrived!

Indoors the color LCD looks awesome! For me my multimeter ends up either sitting flat on my desk on in my lap and in both those cases the display is 10x easier to read than a segment LCD without a backlight.

Outdoors with direct sunlight the segment LCD is easier to read than the color LCD.

In the shade outdoors, I think both display technologies are equally legible.

image

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    1. Good conversation piece scottiebabe ! I have a scopemeter-dvm, somewhat similar to the one pictured. For the scope part, color is essential.  The dvm part is in color , a virtual d'arsonval (sp)  movement rather than a big dvm display, which I find terribly disappointing. It is too slow, the color scheme and graphics are wasteful of the resour ces. I'd prefer big easy to read numbers. 
  • in reply to robogary

    Thanks! I am sure it is a polarizing topic! I bought the unit because of the scope, but it made me wonder if a handheld DMM should have a power hungry display.

    I guess I won't know until I try it!

    The big names in T&M could do a better job at isolating the usb port from the multimeter input jacks. I seriously hope they are at least investigating adding USB to multimeters.

    Millions of consumers are charging their phones with air core transformers, I'm sure they could come up with a magnetics design that is CAT rated.

  • in reply to scottiebabe

    BLE is super-handy for multimeters, there was recently a fairly low-cost (£50 from memory) Multicomp meter with BLE which I really wanted but it was out-of-stock. 

    I've got a couple of instruments with scope-like displays but monochrome (I had an old digital 'scope with monochrome display too, and it worked well apart from it could never have features like persistence on CRT scopes, so colour becomes a lot more important then). One instrument with nice UI is a chart recorder, it has portrait-mode display : ) so that the traces can be nicely separated in monochrome.

    image (image source: google images)

    A nicely laid-out display, and perhaps a menu or more buttons could be nice in a multimeter, since the complex features get hard to recall how to configure.

    Colour would then be icing on the cake, but if it could be bright and readable : ) 

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  • in reply to scottiebabe

    BLE is super-handy for multimeters, there was recently a fairly low-cost (£50 from memory) Multicomp meter with BLE which I really wanted but it was out-of-stock. 

    I've got a couple of instruments with scope-like displays but monochrome (I had an old digital 'scope with monochrome display too, and it worked well apart from it could never have features like persistence on CRT scopes, so colour becomes a lot more important then). One instrument with nice UI is a chart recorder, it has portrait-mode display : ) so that the traces can be nicely separated in monochrome.

    image (image source: google images)

    A nicely laid-out display, and perhaps a menu or more buttons could be nice in a multimeter, since the complex features get hard to recall how to configure.

    Colour would then be icing on the cake, but if it could be bright and readable : ) 

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