Best tuner for ukes?

I avoid Snarks for the reason displayed on the box: "The Best Selling Tuner" means that everybody has one. This makes them easy to get mixed up in a group setting - somebody always needs to borrow a tuner, so they get passed around, left on tables, etc., and then nobody can remember whose Snark it is.

I don't have that problem with my Fender California tuners. Even less so with the Peterson Stroboclip, since nobody wants to borrow it :)

From a practical standpoint, any decent tuner is more accurate than the margin of error you'll get tuning uke strings in a typical jam session, and there are oodles of name brand tuners available fairly inexpensively. I pick whatever's on sale that has a big bright screen that I can read without changing glasses, and which works for me ergonomically.

A few favorites:
Fender California - big & readable, brightly colored, auto-on-and-off when clipped to the headstock
Kliq ubertuner - Uber-bright screen. If I were to rebuy I'd get the USB chargeable one
Peterson Stroboclip, Strobostomp - expensive and overkill for the uke, but they pick up the low notes on the bass wonderfully.

Less favorite:
d'Addario micros - small and can be left on the headstock. These used to be my favorite, and I had them on everything, but I'm finding the screens harder to read now. YMMV
Owl thingy - cute when playing with kids, but hard to read.


At home I'm trying to tune by ear - I'm not good at it, and the only way to get better is to do it. If I start by tuning one string to a known good note I can tune the rest to it and then check how close I am off of a tuning app (I like TE Tuner)
 
I Have a Snark SN6 and a D'addario Eclipse, both are excellent. One benefit (for me) with the D'addario, is that the face (and result) is so large, so easy to read. As a side note, the people at Orangewood thoughtfully included their own tuner with my Juno Tenor, it is also very good.
 
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I used Snarks for a long time. They worked fine, after learning their quirks, and always doing finish tuning by ear. In fact, Snarks are so cheap that I got one to keep with each Ukulele just to avoid the possibility of leaving home without a tuner. The big down side to the Snark is their mechanical design. They have this little ball and socket swivel joint where the tuner head connects to the clamp. It breaks. Often. So if you don't want to be stuck with a busted tuner, get something else. I have a drawer of Snarks, and if you drop by, I'd be glad to give you one. I stopped using Snarks because of the breaking problem. I went to a more expensive and much more accurate tuner, the Polytune Clip. In the chromatic setting, it's advertised to be accurate to + or - 0.02 cents. And, having used them for about three years now, I believe it.
 
Snark's tabs holding the stem that connects the clip to the tuner head is weak and easily broken. Once that tab is broken, the tuner is effectively useless since it can't attach to the instrument. Among all my tuners, only the Snark failed. Here's my Snark; it is so new and failed so easily (encountered a door frame).

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The best tuner for the money IMHO is the Korg TM-60 with the clip-on mic. It is a bit less convenient; but it is fast and accurate (<1 cent error from specs), which more than makes up for the increased size and extra cable. It also functions as a portable metronome and can let you tune by ear by emitting the pitch frequency.

For the money of the Snark, I'd recommend the Fender FD-004, which is a clip-on tuner like the Snark. BUT, the Fender has survived bumps that'd surely would have killed a Snark (based on my firsthand experience with Snark).
 
I avoid Snarks for the reason displayed on the box: "The Best Selling Tuner" means that everybody has one. This makes them easy to get mixed up in a group setting - somebody always needs to borrow a tuner, so they get passed around, left on tables, etc., and then nobody can remember whose Snark it is.

To ID mine, I just take a bottle of Wite' Out (for correcting documents}, and make a few white dots on the front edge, so it's easily recognizable from the others. And/or, get a red one.
 
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