MESR-100 In-Circuit ESR Meter: An aborted product investigation

I bought this popular, inexpensive ESR meter, the MESR-100, from Amazon, with the goal of evaluating it as the subject of a TH-cam documentary.
But as this video shows, I was not impressed by its value and performance, and thought that it was something of an unreliable dud. I have no idea if mine was defective or not, or if it is just a poor design. Anyway, if you are in the market for an ESR meter, I think you can do better than this model for about the same price. Compare this product's performance and capabilities with the EZM Electronics Studio's "ESR-2501C" in my video about that product. It easily outperformed THIS meter, and also has a useful DCR measuring feature. It's ESR readings were consistently in line with the ESR reading obtained form my EXTECH LCR200 meter, and THAT product can only barely test DCR of capacitors. I have returned this product to Amazon.

[@user-to9fw1wv9l]

I can’t stand it. If the product is made in China, the instruction for the product is on a small piece of paper and the typeface is so small I have to take a picture of the instructions and enlarge the directions on my iPhone just to be able to read it. 😡🤬
And you are right it not in English it “Chop Suey English.” And I am Chinese America and I still don’t understand “Chop Suey English.”
I am not into electronics but I do enjoy your explanation. You have a great voice for radio. Take care see you on the next vlog.
🙏🙏🙏

[@marka1986]

That meter is probably "good enough" for general service work to weed out caps that have seriously deteriorated. I used the analog meter based on the creative electronics LM324 circuit. That didn't have nearly the resolution as this but helped fixed many tvs. That circuit sort of generated what looked like a sine wave because the oscillator was 1 section of the 324 and it's slew rate was so poor it looked closer to a crummy sine wave. I can see why you might want to return it though for the price. Looks like about 60 bucks as of April 2024.

[@youtuuba]

Marka, yes this meter costs around $60-$70 from Amazon. The other small ESR meter I showed costs only about $40 from the eBay seller, has a better display, better test leads, more accurate measurements, and also tests capacitive DCR, which not even the EXTECH meter I showed can do properly; I think it is a much better value than the MESR product; it's downside is that there are important things to know to use it correctly, and it comes with no documentation; this is why I made TH-cam video user's manual for it, as well as a downloadable user's manual and a Quick Start Guide, the location if which is shown in that video.
I would caution anyone about thinking this MESR model is "good enough" for casual electronics repair. It's only purpose is to provide good/bad information on capacitors, but at least on mine, some ESR readings were off by nearly an order of magnitude, which can make a good capacitor look bad, and vice versa. Also, because it cannot measure DCR, it can easily lead its user into NOT replacing capacitors which have awful DCR but acceptable ESR (which often happens).

[@hamshackleton]

Less of the alphabet spaghetti - What's an ESR meter. And what's a DSR?

[@charlesdorval394]

What's a search engine...?
Why make the video unnecessarily longer.
If you don't know what an ESR meter is, perhaps this video isn't for you ?