You can get similar precision with vernier calipers or dial calipers but things are just so much faster with the digital calipers even when you don’t care about precision beyond a millimeter or a tenth of an inch. Being able to see a digital readout is much quicker than looking at a row of lines even when I was young enough that I didn’t need reading glasses to see them. But I also do care about being able to measure things to a couple tenths of a mm regularly and on rare occasions I need better precision than that. So having good calipers is worth my while. A fraction of a mm is the difference between a lid fitting loosely or not at all and when you want a tight fit you need decent precision.
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