Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Pros: 1. Relatively easy to set up, even with the rather involved rain gauge calibration procedure. 2. Seems to be fairly accurate with readings as compared to third party sources (AccuWeather, Weather Channel, Wunderground). 3. Entry level pricing. 4. Weather ticker provides interesting bullet facts about the current and average readings. 5. Customer support was very quick to answer the phone and resolved my issue immediately (weather vane drag due to being pushed into the body of the 5-in-1 during shipment). Cons: 1. As others have written, this is NOT a color display weather station. It is a backlit color template over a monochrome LCD display. 2. Backlighting of the indoor 'color' station increases the ambient indoor temperature reading by 5F! Granted, this is a simple math compensation to make, but should I even have to do that? 3. The weather ticker is not easily read from any angle other than straight on. This is a nit pick since the fact is, it's gee-whiz feature to begin with. 4. The online setup and registration of the 5-in-1 is anything but straight-forward or user friendly. A very simple "You must register your MAC address with the Accu-Link PC software before going to the Accu-Link website and entering the MAC address in that program" sentence would have worked great. It seems fairly obvious when put that way, but it is NOT obvious and the directions are unclear. Once this task is done, however, the rest of the operation is enjoyable and the widgets are far easier to read on the laptop than on the LCD 'color' weather station. 5. The buttons on the LCD 'color' weather station are, in a word, atrocious! They are prone to sticking and double selections. There is, or soon will be, a problem with durability, tactile response, and, well, they're just "Easy Bake Oven" cheap. 6. The ability to use this to couple with the Accu-Link or Wunderground sites requires an always-on Windows PC (not MAC) USB connection to the 'color' weather station's USB port. There is an add-on internet bridge sold separately, but I'm not familiar with how that works. My thought is that it must be connected to both the 'color' weather station's USB port and directly wired to a router, but that's only a guess. Summary: The 5-in-1 does what it's advertised to do: it measures the data points relative to current local weather, inside and outside. It's a relatively inexpensive springboard into the world of weather geekdom. There is so much potential in this product that is murdered by the ergonomically inept and misleading 'color' indoor weather station. The fact that the temperature change caused by the backlighting on the 'color' weather station was given the OK by an engineer and the marketing team kept a straight face when they called this a 'color' display at all...frankly, that lops three stars off of this item. It earned back a half star simply because it does sample and report the weather conditions and, once you have worked out the MAC address registration between the two software packages, it is a breeze to register it with Wunderground. This is NOT a 3 star rating, it is a weak 2.5 star. My advice is to look at Oregon Scientific or Davis, etc., and save up for a more robust, weather station. That said, this is a very good device/tool to use for learning weather and how the patterns are interrelated. Maybe a stellar device for a middle school science project, but not a weathergeek device.