NeoRuler Premium Combinato

Hozo Design needs to pay more attention to the production testing phase. The scratches on the exterior edges of the NeoRuler straight out of its packaging give an unprofessional impression and detract from its visual quality.

This is an excellent caliper. I CANNOT COMPREHEND the reviews about it being so hard to use. It is VERY SIMPLE AND EASY to use!! I repeat, there is nothing hard, complicated or frustrating whatsoever about understanding or using this caliper!! For someone who has reasonable technical skill, it is very straightforward, 5-15 min of education and you can be entirely comfortable with its use. You can go to the manufacturers website to get a nice video overview of exactly how it works.

The NeoRuler was originally primarily designed to be an advanced digital drafting ruler. It has an expansion kit that allows it to perform caliper functionality. (This kit has the needed parts to convert back to pure ruler functionality if desired.) The caliper functionality offers repeatable and accurate measurements based on my experiments.

The main complaint I have is that the thumb wheel on the caliper doesn’t work super well. You are supposed to be able to either push ] the moveable caliper jaw along the ruler body for coarse adjustments, or use the thumbwheel for fine adjustments. But the thumb wheel often slips. There is a screw at the top of the caliper that is used to adjust thumbwheel tension and “grip” and it works, but not perfectly. I think a premium caliper like this should should have a better designed thumbwheel. I think the thumbwheel might work better if it had a very small and thin rubber band stretched around it to provide more friction against the opposing surface.

If I could, I’d rate it 4.5 stars due to the thumb wheel issue. But I’m going to give it 5 because overall, it’s an impressive device. Especially if you can also make use of the drafting ruler features.

This digital caliper has many functions and a color digital display.

It comes with a nice zipper closure semi hard case.

There is an app you can download (applo or Android) to use in conjunction with the calipers.

So many useful functions it will take a while to learn them all.

The best use case for this ruler is someone who needs to draw in different scales. It’s clear that was the original intent here. And it’s awesome for that. I like using it for the auto dividing sections feature, handy for finding the exact middle of any arbitrary length. The calipers feel like a bit of a “because we could” feature and are not really as good as a dedicated digital caliper. Primarily the bulky size and lower apparent precision makes the calipers more useful for quick random measurements that don’t need to be more accurate than a tenth of a mm. Also, if you are using it as a ruler, and decide to use it as a caliper it takes a bit of time to attach the parts and then reconfigure/calibrate for caliper mode. It would be faster and more convenient to grab a dedicated digital caliper since this caliper doesn’t do anything that inexpensive digital calipers do. So I would give the ruler 5 stars and the caliper 3 stars. Averaging out to 4 stars. The biggest issue is actually going to be the value proposition. If you primarily need calipers this isn’t a good value. If you mostly need the ruler and it’s scaling features it’s a better value. Lastly, it looks very cool with the led strip that lights the edge as you go. That cool factor may tip the value proposition for you. I will likely use it in ruler mode 90% of the time and I like using it. It’s fun and helpful. It’s just a big ask for most people I think.

This is an amazing digital caliber, super hight tech. My only complaint is that I have to read the directions on how to use all the features. I #D print a lot and having a digital caliper is a necessity. For this review I printed a calibration cube which on a tuned printer should be 20mm all around. Mine came in at 19.9 and 19.8. Close enough for me. This caliper pairs with an app which I will need to figure out how t use. It looks like not is for creating and saving projects. I did try to run the firmware upgrade option on the phone and it did not work. As I said there is so much this caliper can do and I have only scratched the surface with this review. Recommend