Kincrome K8315

Stopped working just out of warranty – Unit turns on but will not read current, voltage or resistance. Show details

Perfect Multimeter ! – I found it to be great every thing in one unit ! i could not give it a bad review for any thing one of the best multi meters i have ever owned !

Disappointing – I ended up returning this product almost immediately, so I'm only going to cover the issues I discovered in my short time with it. First of all, this thing is unreasonably large for a basic DMM. I figured the stock photo on the Kincrome website (attached) was just a bad Photoshop job, but no, it's actually that big. Nearly 8" long and 3.5"… Read more

wide....perhaps the body is shared with some other product that requires more internal space? Regardless, the thing is huge and wouldn't have come close to fitting in any compartment of my perfectly normal electricals toobox.

Secondly, the fuses are mounted on the top side of the PCB so you need to dismantle the entire thing to get at them. Sure, hopefully they'd never need replacing, but it's still a terrible design choice for a user-serviceable component. First time I've ever encountered a DMM that's made the fuses any harder to change than the battery.

Finally and worst of all, the actual performance is simply not good enough. The first thing I tried was the continuity test mode, and it had trouble registering a circuit *across its own leads*. A light touch wasn't enough, I had to force the leads together quite firmly and even then it took a full second or more to actually register the circuit and produce a tone. I seated and reseated the banana plugs, spun them around, and cleaned the lead tips of any impurities as well - no change. My personal use case for a DMM (hobbyist electronics, model trains) relies heavily on the continuity test mode, and if this thing can't reliably detect a circuit across its own leads, how can it be relied on to test real circuits and components? For my money, it can't.

I'm rating this 1/5 stars, with a bonus "benefit of the doubt" star awarded because I did not thoroughly assess any mode beyond the continuity test. Maybe it does those other things better, but I'm not eating $80 to find out when my 10 year old $20 Dick Smith unit is good enough to do the job.