I got my scale from a Laboratory supply catalogue. I work in the food manufacturing industry and these are the scales used in food labs. I am in Canada and ordered mine from Canada Wide Scientific. It has a tare button, so you could put your bowl on first, press tare to zero out the weight of the bowl and then measure the ingredients. It's a great no mess way to measure butter.

A spring scale is not a bad device. Over time, metal fatigue will cause the spring to sag, but there is a little screw adjustment some place for you to compensate for that. The advantage an electronic scale has over a mechanical one is higher resolution. You can get 1/10th to 1/100th of a gram resolution, which a mechanical one cannot achieve. A mechanical scale is in general lineal in response, whereas with an electronic one you are not very sure with the cheap ones. A mechanical scale�s spring response is subjected to temperature changes, and an electronic scale is normally temperature compensated by using a thermistor type of device. As you have indicated, a great advantage with electronic scales is the feature of auto-zeroing to subtract the weight of the container. I suppose this will cancel out some problems of the load cell going out of calibration. I believe the load cell is a resistive device, and therefore may not be classified as a transducer. A fulcrum balance type of mechanical scale eliminates a lot of spring type scale�s problems. dcarch

The conversion that is coming up isn't going to make everything HD. It is going to make everything digital. You most likely are already converted since you can already watch DVD's on your TV.

There is no single conversion--that's the whole point of using a scale. For example, flour will vary in "density" (i.e. grams per cup) depending on humidity, type of flour, whether you sift it or not, how tightly you pack the measuring cup, etc. That is why it's more accurate to use weight, rather than volume, for solid measurements. The problem is that many recipes don't give weights, just volumes, though more baking recipes these days do give weight measures recognizing their greater accuracy. Having said that, a quick Google search will give you many rough conversions. See for example volume to weigh conversion tables