An expensive disappointment, the Salter 1450 costs twice as much as some other scales but then muffs the execution of an important feature.
In a sense, Salter is competing with itself with the Salter 1450 Digital Nutrition Scale. The Salter 1440, which found a position as one of Our Favorites, has what appears to be an identically large database and a similar method of operation. Which raises the question of whether or not the 1450 has extra features that justify having a price tag that is more than twice as high. Unfortunately, the answer is that does not.
As with the Salter 1440, to search for a food in the database the name of the food must be spelled out by entering letters on the scale's numeric keypad. To find french fries fried in vegetable oil, for example, the user would start by pressing the [FOOD] key. Then the [3] key would have to be pressed three times to get the F, followed by pressing the [7] key three times to get the R and the [3] key twice to get the E. Once you have entered "FRE", the display will show "FRENCH BEANS." Press the down button eight times and hit [ENTER] to select "FRENCH FRIES FRIED IN VEG OIL." That makes 18 total key presses to get what on another scale would take three key presses. And the search only works from the start of a food name, so there is no searching for all food items that contain "FRIES" in their name.
The Salter 1450 does have two independent memories to store nutrient totals and a removable stainless steel weighing platform. These are both nice features.
But the Salter 1450 fails with the feature that has the potential to be its most valuable. Like the Kitrics 120, the Salter 1450 can be programmed with nutrition data from other sources, for example the Nutrition Facts label on a packaged food. However a user will find significant difficulty in exercising this feature, because the scale requires that all quantities of nutrients correspond to a 100-gram sample. This is unusual because most nutrition labels do not specify a 100-gram serving size. To process a nutrition label for a food that has, for example, a 28-gram serving size, each and every nutrient value from the label must be multiplied by 100 and then divided by 28 before it can be entered into the Salter 1450. This turns a feature that could have been a real time saver into a chore for the user. It is a boneheaded design decision. And by badly implementing this feature Salter has made the 1450 not worth its premium price.
One additional note: TonysPlate.com, in a effort to assist owners of the Salter 1450 has produced the Salter 1450 Helper page, which can take the inputs from a Nutrition Facts label and convert it to a form that is compatible with the Salter 1450.