Looking for a quality digital scale at a fair price.

Your choices will almost certainly be either large-capacity/1-gram-resolution or small-capacity/0.1-gram-resolution. (Of course, a large-capacity/0.1- gram-resolution scale might come on the market next year:-) You'll need the large capacity to handle all the flour and water when mixing up a whole batch of dough. But at typical batch sizes the "small" ingredients -like yeast and salt- need the finer resolution. You can either use the old "teaspoon" type measurements for the small ingredients (which many people do, but which can leave you doing an awful lot of arithmetic if you use bakers percentages to "scale" batches up and down). Or you can do what I do, which is have two scales.

The higher resolution scales are quite inexpensive (less than $10 if you shop carefully), so this strategy won't cost a lot. Those small high resolution scales are very common these days, you'll find lots of them if you search "pocket digital scale" (if you search anything else though, you may swear they don't exist).

Regarding choosing a scale, it seems to me that:

• almost all of them are manufactured in China (even if the marketing brand is based in the U.S.)
• most useful functions (tare, gram/ounce switch, etc.) are "standard" on virtually all of them - only a few of the more esoteric functions (direct use of "bakers percentages") vary
• all of them cost about the same (assuming you shop wisely - it's possible to goof up and pay more than twice the going rate and not get anything better)
• they change very quickly (much of what folks here have is already unavailable, much of what you find in stores few people here have)
• almost every brand has several models (3-5), and the lowest model is a too-too-cheap piece-of-junk loss-leader (many stores don't even carry the lowest model of many brands) (so IMHO choosing a brand by looking for the lowest price of the lowest model does not work very well - in fact my suggestion is to never buy the lowest model of any brand)
• it seems to me that there's no discernable relation between higher cost and higher quality
• online descriptions never give enough detail about the things that matter to make a choice - either hold your nose and just guess, or go to a bricks-and-mortar store where you can see the merchandise (note though the two scales might need different strategies: bricks-and-mortar for the large-capacity scale, online for the high-resolution scale)

Some things to consider when choosing:

• does it come with a bowl, or not? (if so, is the bowl large enough for your typical batch, and is the bowl easily detachable? if not, will your bowl fit easily on the tray?)
• does it use a "common" type of battery so that you can get replacements very easily?
• does it "recalibrate" every time you pour too slowly (some folks like the accuracy, most are driven nuts by the continually changing readings)
• is the display very easy to read? (big plain numerals? visible from any angle? backlit? high contrast?)

(One other warning: some of the newer scales have a "liquid"/"fluid ounce" mode. "Fluid ounces" are extremely confusing and totally unnecessary for breadbaking. It's a way for the scale to one-up the competition  ...but you'll probably never use it, at least not for breadbaking.)

Amusingly, Harbor Freight offers a digital counter scale, fairly inexpensive, max to about 5lb, grams or ounces.  It also has "calorie counting" nonsense, but it's ignorable.

ETA:  Just looked at <a href="http://www.harborfreight.com/digital-scale-95364.html"> a newer scale </a> it's nicer than the one I got.

5Kg max for $17 or so.  seems worth a risk.