Hi, with me it ran like this:
When I restarted my electronic activities, I bought a bunch of Chinese low-cost meters. For the coarse stuff I needed in the beginning, they were good enough.
After a while I tried to build and measure trickier things, and that brought them to the limit. RMS was no RMS, resistor measurements had large errors, ...
In the debugging process of a larger circuit, I found out (after a few wasted hours) that not my circuit was wrong, but the multimeter displayed nonsense.
Lesson learned: I kicked all of them out and bought some Fluke 85V for about 20 times the price of the junk.
Status today:
- All the 85 Vs work and display the same values within their tolerance
- All (I bought 5) are still on the first battery after 3 years.
- Never had an issue with wrong readings
- They have a LIFETIME guarantee (their definition of lifetime is eight years after a model has been discontinued).
- They are safe, with ample protection by MOVs and fuses. See Daves tests for multimeter safety, then you will probably never by a cheap one
In other words this stuff is an investment, but worth the money.