This is one of the first questions we ask anyone who is considering purchasing a Vickers hardness tester. But the answer is often not so straightforward, as many factors need to be taken into account.
It’s a consideration that needs to be based on several aspects:
How often would you like to use your Vickers hardness tester?
How thorough would you like the hardness assessments to be?
How many people will use the instrument?
If you need to carry out standardised welding or case hardening tests, keep in mind that a manual version would not be able to ensure the same performance levels of its automatic counterpart in terms of reproducibility, accuracy, speed and ease of execution.
The automatic hardness tester is much more suited for frequent use when compared with its manual counterpart.
If you carry out a substantial number of Vickers tests per month, an automatic instrument is certainly preferable, especially if used by several people and there is a need for registered access to the same, and personal user accounts.
If, on the other hand, its use is more limited, with only a few test cycles carried out every month, always by the same one or two individuals, then the manual hardness tester might be a better solution.
When people think of a manual hardness tester, they immediately picture an analogue model. With this solution, Vickers test results could neither be shared nor contextualised, as they would be reduced to a simple list of numbers to be recorded by hand.
However, in an increasingly interconnected world, it is impossible to overlook parameters such as:
This is why all our Vickers hardness testers, both manual and automatic, give and will always give the possibility of interconnecting and contextualising hardness values.
For us, therefore, manual and analogue are not synonymous.
Select the degree of artificial intelligence that best meets your needs: discover the various Vickers hardness tester versions, designed to offer different levels of technological performance.
