EEVblog 1636 - Ultimate Multimeter Beginners Guide!

Hi, these are all examples of digital multimeters or DMMs and we're going to take a quick look at what these are and how they work, what they're useful for. Let's go. And they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes from little pocket ones like this to like smaller compact ones to ones your electricians might use to

larger ones that you might find in a like a higher end electronics lab. And they can vary in price from $2 right up to like 7 $800 something like that for like a really advanced big brand name one. Regardless of the type you get, they're all going to be basically similar. They're going to have an LCD

display on them typically with four digits. For your lower end ones, your higher end ones might have five digits. They're called counts. And what the number of counts on a multimeter means is just the maximum value it can go up to on the reading. This is a 6,000 count meter, so it'll go to 6,000 maximum or

6.000 and this is a 3,200 count meter. So, if I turn the voltage up here, they can both measure the same number of digits at 3.1 volts and at 3.2, but if I go to 3.3, you'll see that this ranges to the next range and you lose a digit. So, the more counts, the better.

And most of them will contain a selection dial like this so you can select turn it off and you can select various different functions, hence the name multimeter. It has multiple functions. Although there are a few others like these two here that don't have a range switch, instead they have push buttons on the front. But

personally, I'd go for the ones with real range switches like this because you can just switch them off, you know they're off. It's much easier than mucking around with these push buttons. And really, don't go for any that have built-in rechargeable batteries like this or ones with backlit displays like this. They're just not worth