It took a few attempts to work out how to get a reading. Once you've used the lancet injector, and produced a drop of blood the instructions say to put the blood onto the test strip pad. This is wrong. Look at the end of the test strip, when it is inserted in the device (Note that the blue and white part is uppermost). You'll see two black pads, linked together with three little black lines. See the photo Dip the edge of the testing strip where the gap is, into the small blood spot on your finger. Like dipping a Toast Soldier into a soft boiled egg. You don't need to smear the drop on top of the strip as I was initially trying, and wondering if the meter was knackered. A small amount of blood is sucked up by capillary action, and starts the countdown timer after which your result is shown in mmol/L. The amount of blood needed is minuscule once you know how to use this device. I wasted several test strips and lancets before I worked out what to do. The lancet autojet device is supposed to show a red dot through the clear button. There is no red dot on mine, but looking closely you'll see the viewing window on the button goes from showing a white bar, to a white circle (where the red paint should be). Access to the hole where the lancet goes is achieved by unscrewing the part where the the pin depth is shown. I have mine set to 4. I also noted that the device tends to cock itself when pushing the lancet into the hole, no need to cock the autojet by pulling the cocking handle on the rear. Using the autojet feels like being pinged with a small elastic band. It's not painful. The kit comes in a quite frankly cheap little case. I'll be changing the case to something more robust, and better made. Probably a small compact camera case, or similar. A blood glucose indicator card is supplied, showing the mmol/L with a conversion to mg/dl (how the Americans measure blood glucose). I found this card to be broadly useless. The colour scheme uses green to show a 'borderline' high reading instead of green to be a normal (non diabetic) level. Normal is blue. I'll use the info on diabetes.co.uk or diabetes.org.uk The reason for dropping a star in each category is mainly down to what I thought is unclear instructions, the crappy blood chart, and a poor storage case. The meter and autojet are made of a decent standard, as you'd hope. Would I buy this again, given a choice? Yes.
