A kitchen scale gives the most accurate calorie log possible. It is also the single biggest reason people quit tracking within the first two weeks. Weighing every ingredient of every meal is accurate and, for almost everyone, unsustainable. Here is what actually holds up over months, not just the first motivated week.
Reserve the scale for the meals where it matters
You do not need to weigh a bowl of cereal to within a gram. You do need precision on calorie-dense, easy-to-underestimate foods: cooking oil, nut butter, cheese, dressing. A tablespoon of olive oil is roughly 120 calories, and eyeballing "a drizzle" instead of measuring is where most home-cooked meals quietly go over budget. Weigh or measure the handful of dense ingredients that actually move the number. Eyeball the rest.
Log immediately, not from memory
Logging a meal an hour after eating it, from memory, is where most of the real error creeps in, more than any measurement method. Log at the table or in the kitchen, while the plate is still in front of you, not at the end of the day trying to reconstruct what you ate.
Photo logging trades some precision for consistency
A photo-based log will not be as precise as a scale on any single meal. What it changes is whether you keep logging at all: no ingredient list to search, no manual entry, just a photo before you eat. The honest tradeoff is accuracy per meal against consistency over months, and for most people, a slightly less precise log kept every day beats a perfectly precise log abandoned after two weeks.
Repeat meals are the easiest win
Most people eat a fairly small rotation of meals on a normal week. Get the entry for the meals you eat often actually right once, whether that is a saved log, a photo you have scanned before, or a manually corrected entry, and most of your logging accuracy for the month comes from those few meals being handled well, not from getting every one-off meal perfect.
Arcal is built around the photo-first version of this: point the camera, log in seconds, and cut the friction that makes people quit before the scale-precision question even comes up. Join the waitlist or see the full feature list.