Milwaukee Laser Distance Meters: 330' $116, 150'

I am a contractor and have used these daily for many years. There is some misinformation here, let me clarify:

While most things are made in China, and indeed Milwaukee is owned by a Chinese investment company, the name brand ones like this, like lieca, like bosch etc.. are much much better than cheap Amazon or aliexpress ones.

In general you can get good quality dewalt or bosch measures for around $30, they are very accurate and good enough for most situations, you start to pay more for longer distance capacity, also as the price rises they get a little bit smarter, the mid tier ones can calculate Sq ft and cu ft and often have some very simple trigonometry function

The top tier ones often measure longer distances still and sometimes have super nice screens and sometimes Bluetooth so you can log a lot of measurements.

..

In general I like the cheaper simpler ones as long as they can shoot far enough.

Most people use these for estimating, for example the first I started seeing these on jobsites 25 years ago was drywall estimators who would walk room to room and gather Sq ft of wall and lid.

Nowadays they are cheap and everyone has them, carpenters often use them for running baseboard because it's faster to get inside measurements, only one hand needed vs a tape measure where you constantly need to set the tape down to write each measurement [good finish carpenters will measure a whole floor at a time or at least a couple of rooms at a time and then go to the cut station and chop it up, so being able have a notebook (or block of wood) in one hand and the distance measurer and pencil in the other hand really does save a lot of time.

..

Also Don't mess with the off brand cheap stuff, I've played with a few, they often are way overrated for distance, the laser dot is huge (so hard to know exactly what you're focused on) and inconsistent.

Also I'm no social warrior but cheap tool factories are often where some of the worst human rights abuses happen, less so in China but seriously don't buy cheap tools from Pakistan or India or anywhere around there. We are talking about young children forced into extremely dangerous work, going blind and loosing limbs etc, nobody needs those garbage tools and the price that is payed, albeit not by us as the buyers but other people, is just WAY too high. Also like I said you can get good quality bosch and dewalt ones for almost as cheap.

Everything is Chinese, bud.

Plenty of comparison videos on youtube. I think it's quite indicative if you're debating getting AliExpress/Chinese meters when it comes to using something to be accurate.