I am growing more and more fond of my dial calipers and wanted to see what others on here thought, and maybe if you can quantify or explain it better than I can.
When measuring at my thickness planer or when measuring the thickness of a material for CAD/CAM software, I have been leaning toward my dial waaay more often over the last year. I like that I get more of a feel for the measurement. I’m not sure I can put my finger on it exactly. I have good quality for both analog and digital, so that isn’t it… The dial just seems to help me narrow in on the variations along the material better than simply seeing a digital number jitter.
I have both digital and analog calipers. The advantage of the digital calipers is you can change to metric and back to SAE. The analog calipers are likely more accurate. The Igaging digital 6" caliper I have go off automatically so to wake it up you just move the head. However when I move it to the zero position often it has some small fraction so I have to zero it almost every time I pick it up. The 6" digital only does SAE in decimal and not in fractions for SAE. I also have a 12" digital caliper and it does decimal SAE as well as fractional and of course metric. That is a handy function but being 12 inches it is hard to handle because of the overall length. The only other issue with digital is if the battery gets low it can be very inaccurate. You need to have spare batteries if you only have a digital caliper or you are dead in the water.
If I only had one caliper I would choose analog. I rarely use metric and SAE is my preferred measuring system. Old habits die hard.
Throughout my work career my vernier calipers were my go to. It wasn’t until I started needing reading glasses did I change to digital. The convenience of being able to change between imperial and metric is nice.
My Fowler 6"/150mm vernier has inch to .001 resolution and mm to .05 resolution. I use it every once in a while (using a headband lighted magnifier!) just to keep in practice.