Recently, my very old Metex M-4650CR begun to show a 0.5VDV offset from real values, so I decided to buy a new DMM - after almost 30 yrs.
I am an amateur, occasionally designing, etching, soldering and programming minor embedded toys, and doing some stuff with RC-planes. Thats all. But I am a bit tech-addicted, like features and I like to be busy with all that fancy gear, part of the hobby, so to say.
So I came to eevblog where I found quite some good discussions concerning various DMM, I tried the UT181A which is a great meter, but then I saw Joes video where he killed the UT181A. And since the secret of the mod wasn't revealed by Joe, this thing was out of my choice. I don't want to take care whether I crossed a carpet or not before using my DMM.
So I ordered a 289 which arrived last week. What a brick.
But I like it very much. There are some annoyances, sure. Booting takes long but for me this is not a real issue. I switch it on and have always to do some minor things before I start using it.
Trend display is indeed sloooow ... And there is no 'REL' button directly accessible. These are my only real complaints - but I can (and have to) live with this.
Display: After reading here I was very concerned about the quality of the display. But I must say: It is of course not as bright and colorful like the 181A TFT. But in a normal lab (or better say workshop-)situation, it is excellent to read as it just stands in front of me. And in a dim room, the backlight is absolutly sufficient.
But what surprised me most was, that, side be side outside on a bright day, the 289 was much better to read than the 181A.
So to my mind, the rants about the display seem more a complaint about the boring user-experience with a monochrome LCD display - which I can understand. But in my opinion the display is perfectly ok for workshop-situations, it is very good in bright outdoor-conditions, and all in all it is not as bad as it is depicted in many posts.
I like that brick.