Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsIt is frustratingly nearly great.. But not quite.
Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2021
The entire scale industry is plagued with algorithm issues, not just in coffee brew scales, but in bathroom and kitchen scales.
The internal programming uses strain gauges and averages to produce a weight for us to read.
The frustration comes from the delays and offsets before it delivers that result to us.
The higher end scales, including those for commercial and scientific use are faster, and more repeatable.
Consumer and cheaper options have a tendency to alleviate accuracy problems by rounding up to larger and larger amounts, either up or down, to display something most people wouldn't even notice.
Enter us, the coffee snobs, who want to turn variables into constants. Just the most annoying people on earth, demanding professional results, for as cheap a price as possible, for a niche use that may have a product not even be in existence for what we want.
Not only do we want accuracy, but we want it to be fast enough that it can measure a poured liquid quantity as it gathers weight, so we can stop the flow when it's arrived, and be small enough to fit between the porta filter and grate of our chosen espresso machine.
This can rule out perfectly good and reliably accurate scales, simply because they aren't fast enough.
This scale.. The black mirror, is SO close to delivering everything, but just ever so slightly leaves some residual annoyances.
It's got the features you might want. It has the looks. It has some accuracy that would be accuracy enough for our needs, but it's ever so slightly unrepeatable.
For instance, if you turn the scale on, zero it out, and place an object on the scale, it won't even register before the item is 0.5 grams.
They admit to it, and stress that it's because they don't want the scale to fluctuate while sitting still.. I say, if that isn't an accuracy issue to begin with, then you shouldn't have taken that upon yourself to have it do when I want to see every change.
Secondly, the tare function isn't repeatable, as is the case for so many scales. This is again a side effect of the rounding up and down of the programming at work.
It's easy to have the scale fake a return to zero, even if it's a little off, but not so much when it's in tare mode, as you just forced a situation where it cannot fake it.
If you weigh something, note it's weight, then tare and remove that object, the scale should display the item weight in a negative form. It often doesn't and can be out by as much as .3 grams.
The repeating of 0.3 out is very noticeable with this scale. It also seems to be a factor, very much like the 0.5 thresh hold at the start of a weight that seems to continue throughout it's use.
Namely; it will not move until it registers 0.3 grams of change, but if you add, say, a coffee bean (with a weight of roughly 0.1 grams), and THEN nudge the scale, it will successfully weigh the change of 0.1 and add it to the weight, even though it wasn't going to re-tally until it hit that 0.3 thresh hold.
This causes a situation where if you take weight away, it will cause the nudge of you reaching in, with a spoon, or even your fingers to raise the weight temporarily enough to cause the recalculation nudge it seems to require to re-tally.
This only works when removing weight, but not adding, as we aren't nudging when adding another bean or two, where it will want that full 0.3 amount before recalculating.
This creates a one way annoying street of you over-weighing if say, you're at 50.9 grams and you wanted exactly 51, you'll add a couple more beans, have it not register, add a couple more and have it jump to 51.2, only to then remove 2 beans again (even the same beans) and you nudge causing it to measure it properly this time and settle on the weight you wanted (51).
It means the accumulated weight is now, honestly, not trusted by you. You know the two beans you added should have raised the weight, but they didn't, and so you stop trusting the scale quite as much as you should be able to.
In me it creates a situation where I now repeatedly add the extra tiny items and then tap the scale to nudge it like someone with OCD. I shouldn't have to do this. It's not acceptable. I'm having to help it out, and it also annoyingly shows it's capable of this accuracy but has been restricted just to, again, not show a fluctuating weight.
It's a real shame as this is just a pointless, fake protective illusionary shell, pretending to be an accuracy cure, when we want to see the results, warts and all, even if it veers in real time, just like the Acaia Lunar does.. You can tap the table and that things bounces around in weight. That's what we want and need here, and you removed it as a beauty filter factor.
The Acaia Lunar costs 4 times as much as this one though.
The Lunar is also much faster to respond. The timermore isn't bad, and will work, but you'll see the difference when it comes time to shut off your water flow. There's a tiny little lag where it continues to tick up the weight.
I think the company could fix this and have it be an Acaia Lunar killer.
As it is, it isn't quite as good, for seemingly pointless window dressing reasons.
Very very close.. But at this price, I'm still staying here, understanding it's shortfalls, and living with them rather than spending 4 times the cost just 'cos. It's good enough.
Scoring this at a 3 is harsh when comparing it to a regular kitchen scale.
It's FAR better and faster than that, and would otherwise score a 4..
In the world of coffee scales needing to do what they do, a 3 is fair, because it is stopping just short of it's entire point in life, just to prevent bouncing of numbers, and I find that very frustrating.
