Though many readers here will be too young to remember there was a time when hi-fi was all the rage and much debate about who had the best amplifiers with the highest peak power capabilities, best balanced hum, minimum harmonic distortion, best channel separation... As components improved it became possible for anyone who employed a good engineer or 2 to design a superb amplifier (we are excluding those that think only vaccum tubes have "mellow" enough sound and the FETs produce "brittle" sound etc. from this discussion) and the performance was limited by the transducer i.e. the loud speakers. It's pretty much the same with pH meter's today. Most manufacturers have excellent electronics and the limitations are in the electrodes. Most electronics now have really high input impedance, low drift, low noise, accurate A/D converters, ATC, and are capable of automatic multi point calibration with automatic buffer recognition. And, beyond that, electrode technology has advanced in the last few years to the point where you don't have to spend $1000 for a good meter/electrode combination - though you certainly can if you really want too. So now the limitation on accuracy of a pH meter is really the buffers. Any meter with 0.5 mV rms noise or less and 0.5°C rms temperature accuracy or better can read pH to a little better than ± 0.02 when using technical buffers rated ± 0.02 as long as the reading is made about half way between the buffer pH's (and this is the case in mash, beer, wort etc.) and the electrode's isoelectric pH falls in the range 7±0.5 pH which most do (but I mention this because I have one that doesn't). The caveats concerning fresh buffers and proper calibration and measurement procedure are obviously attached.
There is no difference in the electronics of a pH meter for beer than for any other application. Brewing does impose some requirements on an electrode, however, and those mostly have to do with the ability of gums, proteins and sugars to plug the reference junction frit. In the past this was solved with sleeve junctions in which the frit is replaced by something like a glass stopper held in place with a spring. If the junction plugged it was "renewed" by pushing the "stopper" out of the "bottle" thus letting electrolyte flow over the ground glass flusing away the blocking material. But even this seems un-necessary with today's technology. I have found much less expensive fixed junction electrodes to serve for a bit over 2 years in brewing without problems. Point being that describing this meter as "for beer" may be more marketing than anything else.
All this aside Hana makes good gear - not the Rolls Royce of instrumentation perhaps but why pay for features you don't really need like the ability to record all the GLP data, attach conductivity, ISE, ORP and DO electrodes, interface to your computer over USB, write to a thumb drive etc.?
