I’ve had a few multi meters in my life; my father bought me an analog one that I have no idea where it ended up. A few years back, I replaced it with a smaller one that was also analog. Everything that I’ve read indicated that analog meters were faster than digital meters as the needle jumps quickly to the value. This past week when I was assembling a cable for the MacBook Pro, I had to set the voltage to the 150 V DC range as the lower range went from 0-15 V DC. The MacBook Pro uses 16.5-19.5 V DC. The problem is that it’s really hard to tell if the voltage is 16.5 or 19.5 when the full range is 150; the difference amounts to 2% of the scale.
I went to Fry’s (the store I goto when I know what I want and don’t expect to return anything) and picked up the cheapest digital multi meter I could fine; it cost $10. As I don’t use a meter all that often, this would be more than adequate. Here’s a case where the digital meter performs much better than an analog meter; you can tell the difference quite quickly. Am I convert to digital meters? We’ll see.
Analog reads faster but digital is more accurate than analog. Its easy to read numbers than estimating line bar where arrow has pointed.