I need a Digital Multimeter! electronics newbie

[giolicious]

I'm trying to look for a cheap digital multimeter but pretty accurate enough for testing. I found a $38 Mastech MS8268 on ebay but is it good enough for beginners like me? Obviously, flukes are too expensive for me.

[IanB]

Price is no guarantee of accuracy in a meter.

When choosing a meter you first need to decide what you want to use it for. Is it for electronics or electrical maintenance? Is it for low voltages like batteries, or dangerous voltages like mains? What things do you want to measure: voltage, current, resistance, capacitance, temperature, ...?

Once you have your needs mapped out, then you can shortlist meters with appropriate features.

[ablacon64]

IanB is right. Define what you want and it's gonna be easy (as in "less complicated") to choose.

When I started I bought an all-in-one multimeter (voltage, current, temperature, frequency, whatever), I ended up discovering that it would not do well any of its functions.

If you want to learn I recommend you to avoid auto range, but you need more care on measuring. Today I'm a fan of the analog. 

[Simon]

standard question, and standard answer is amprobe AM220 or 240. unless you have a very specific requirement in which case please explain.

[Uncle Vernon]

Why not have a look at Dave's $50 & $100 Meter Shootout videos, lots of material to help you evaluate your decision and some short lists of meters worth considering.  You be pushed to find any better comparisons.

[ablacon64]

Well remembered, this is a good place to start:
http://www.eevblog.com/2011/04/30/eevblog-168-how-to-set-up-an-electronics-lab/

[EEVblog]

I have 52 minutes worth of advice on the topic:



Dave.

[alm]

I've often seen these kind of questions about a topic Dave devoted an entire (or multiple) episode to. Are posters just too lazy to search or is it that it's hard to find the correct episode if you don't know what you're looking for and could it be made more accessible somehow?

[Kiriakos-GR]

Probably  if the " Episodes List "button in the front page haves another color, it could possibly track down more attention.

http://www.eevblog.com/episodes/   

[McMonster]

Sometimes it's hard to find the episode even if you know what you are looking for, happened to me quite a few times. I think this is mostly due to crap search on the blog's side. The search field is nearly on the bottom of the site and it doesn't work properly. You can go directly to Google and use site:eevblog.com <keywords>, but not all the people know and can use it.

Also I think Dave could consider using more detailed tags, that shouldn't be needed with fixed search, but would be nice. Just my 0.03€.

[Flavour Flave]

Maybe have a sticky in the beginners section titled something like "noobs look here before posting first time" and have the collated Q&A's  posted in there.

[alm]

Yes, the eevblog.com search is useless. The episode list is fairly usable, but is getting kind of long. More tags and linking to something like Google site search instead of the Wordpress search might help.