Oh boy was I delighted when I could buy Chinese precision scales in, uhm, 2008 I think? Dealextreme was a fairly new thing, then I found out about Ebay selling this Chinese crap. (Crap being used in positive meaning, this is.)
I got a 0.01g resolution, max 300g scale first, then a 0.1g resolution, 2000g one, and finally, a 0.001g 20g thing. All below $10 IIRC, and they all came with calibration weighs. None of them are as good as $1000 scales with similar specifications, but no ones expecting that. The bang-for-buck is great.
Even the first one still works, after over 10 years of almost daily use. I check the calibration every few years. These seem to be repeatable, I would even dare to suggest accurate, to about +/- 3 least significant digits and have a minimum measurable offset of about 7-10 least significant digits.
What for?
Yes, I did some chemistry as a hobby and later professionally as well. Was developing films and built a motion picture film processing lab. Of course, for the short while as a professional motion lab, I mostly used prepackaged Kodak kit chemistry but I still mixed some solutions like black & white developers or experimental processing solutions from scratch. I also experimented doing the film itself, this is, black&white emulsions from scratch, using food grade gelatine, silver nitrate made from dissolving silver into nitric acid (beware: deadly gasses emerge!), bromide and iodine salts and some other special sensitizing agents I already forgot about. The combo of science + art of growing the microscopic silver halide crystals through careful process control (temperatures, stirring, chemical injection rates), affecting the film's sensitivity, graininess and resolution, was indeed interesting. A strange mix of very low and high tech, when you can produce a 100-megapixel equivalent image by a process consisting of only mixing basic chemicals. This is how it worked for well over 100 years - and of course, it still works.
Now I mostly use the scales for weighing coffee. 24 grams per 0.5 liter of water, oh yes.