Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

For the first month of life, gaining weight for my newborn son was proving to be a challenge. Breastfeeding, as it turns out, is a lot harder than they make it look in the movies. Concerned about how much my son was consuming directly from the breast, my wife and I rented a hospital-grade scale from a local lactation consultant for a month (they actually sell it on Amazon, it's the Medela Baby Weigh II, and it costs an eye-watering $1600 at the time of this writing). We loved the convenience and piece of mind the scale brought, but wanted a scale for ourselves. Though this isn't the highest rated or best-selling baby scale on Amazon, it has the highest precision (5 grams). When it arrived, I immediately tested it by weighing objects on the two scales. My son's beluga whale doll weighed 196 grams on the hospital-grade scale and 195 grams on the Beurer. What I presume the 5 gram precision to mean is that if an object's true weight is 197 grams (for example) it will round down to 195; if it's true weight is 198 grams, it will round up to 200 grams. So if you're using this scale to get an estimate of how much milk your child is drawing from breastfeeding, it will be off by at most 2.5 grams (or 2.5 milliliters) which for $50 is definitely good enough. You have to end up paying A LOT more to get that extra precision a hospital grade offers. The scale has a tare button, a switch on the bottom to convert the display from pounds, to ounces, to kilograms. In my usage, I just keep it on kilograms, and if I need to convert to pounds, I just multiply by 2.2. It has an auto-hold feature where if your baby is squirmy, it will wait until it is more still before locking in on the weight. This is a great feature, but I haven't tested it out too much. I'd say the ONLY feature of this scale that I think is missing from the hospital-grade scale is the ability to display the weight in both pounds and ounces. If I kept the switch set to pounds, my son might weigh 10.8 pounds on this scale, but the hospital grade scale will read 10 pounds 13.4 ounces (for example). Not a big deal, since I can do the math in my head or use google to convert, but it's handy. Also, the hospital-grade scale was designed for the breastfeeding use case so it has buttons to remember the pre-feed and post-feed weights with a third button to calculate the difference. Again, I can do this manually, but it would be a killer feature for this product. For it's accuracy, price, and ease of use, I give it 5 stars. Adding the features I mentioned above would turn it into the rare 6 star product for me.