About a month ago, I purchased an EX430 from Amazon. The price was only $60. What a deal! A week later, the meter arrived. I opened the box from amazon, and the EX430 box was already open. This should have set off some alarms in my head, but the meter did not seem to be damaged and was functioning. I use the word functioning because it seemed a little off.
I was testing it against a couple $5 meters, and the cheap meters were measuring about the same. The EX430 though, was off by about a volt or two on the voltage ranges. I didn't think much of it. It is very possible that the cheap meters were off by the same amount. This was the first "Higher End" multimeter that I had used. As soon as I checked temperature, I realized something was wrong. In a 70 degree room, the meter would read anywhere from 40 to 110. This problem was intermittent, along with a few other problems similar to it.
Fast forward a month... I was working on building a linear power supply using some parts I received. I was measuring the output of the transformer with the meter on AC auto mode. All of a sudden, the meter died.
When I say died, I mean just died. That was it. It would not do anything. I checked the battery, fuses, and looked over the boards. I saw zero problems. I am thinking there was a problem with the main processor when I got it, and it just finally died.
So, I emailed Extech on a Sunday night at 11:30 (Late night inventing, as I always do). The next morning at 10:00 AM, I got an email back. They said that they would send me a new meter, free of charge. A couple emails later, the new meter was shipped to me. It arrived today, Friday of the same week. It arrived free of defects, and is working wonderful.
It is a 100% improvement from the old one. I am thinking I am one of the unlucky people who received a faulty meter. Lucky for me, Extech was awesome and fixed everything for me. So, in conclusion, Extech is nowhere near the quality of a Fluke, but the customer service I received was second to none. So even after my fist Extech meter being a complete piece of garbage, I will buy meters in the future from them. For the price, the products and service they provide is wonderful. I give them a thumbs up!