As the owner of a Single Frequency Renpho Smart Scale that I’ve used for a few years now, I thought it might be interesting to reach out to Renpho and ask if they’d allow us to review their flagship Dual Frequency MorphoScan Nova.
While devices like this aren’t clinical devices, and so shouldn’t be treated as such, they can absolutely give you the data you need to make and to alter choices for your health’s sake. I’m not on a weight loss journey per se, but I am interested to know things like skeletal muscle mass (I’m a 51 year old male and it’s around this stage of life that stuff like this starts to become more important). My visceral fat rating — visceral fat (the fat around your organs, not under your skin) is the one most consistently linked in the research to cardiometabolic risk, though It’s worth stressing that the Nova’s visceral-fat figure is an algorithmic estimate rather than a direct measurement of the amount of visceral fat around your organs. I’m guessing it’s a good idea to keep an eye on that, and it’s one of the 50-plus metrics the Nova promises to track.
What you actually get
The MorphoScan Nova is Renpho’s flagship body-composition scale, sitting at $299 AUD (RRP $469 AUD) and built around Dual-Frequency Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis (DF-BIA). Where my older single-frequency scale sends one electrical current through the body, the Nova uses two frequencies, 20kHz and 100kHz. In theory, using two frequencies provides more information about the body’s extracellular and intracellular water compartments, which feeds into a more detailed set of body-composition estimates, including protein percentage, segmental muscle and fat breakdowns, and SMI, metrics that aren’t typically available on basic single-frequency scales.
Physically, it’s a noticeably bigger and chunkier unit than my old Renpho scale. It has eight full-glass ITO (Indium Tin Oxide) electrodes: four on the platform for your feet, and four more built into a detachable handle, so it can take readings through your upper body as well as your legs. That handle has its own 4.3-inch full-colour TFT display, which means you can get a full readout standing there without ever opening the app — a genuinely nice touch if you just want a quick number rather than a phone ritual every morning.
A few practical notes from actually living with it:
- It’s USB-C rechargeable, which is a welcome change from battery-swapping.
- The handle’s cable doesn’t always retract as smoothly as I’d like — a minor niggle, but one worth mentioning.
- It’s built solidly, with nothing that feels cheap or flexes underfoot.
The numbers game: 50+ metrics, one asterisk
Renpho’s headline claim is “50+ body metrics,” covering body fat, bone mass, muscle mass, body water, protein, skeletal muscle, visceral fat index, BMR, BMI, waist-hip ratio, metabolic age, and segmental muscle/fat analysis by limb and torso. All of it streams into the RENPHO Health App for trend tracking over time.
The asterisk, and Renpho says this themselves in the product’s own disclaimers, is that the scale “is only for daily use at home, and should not be considered for medical purposes,” and that a medical professional should be consulted for any dietary or exercise changes. That lines up with what I think most sensible reviewers of these devices land on: it’s a reasonable device for tracking trends over time, rather than a diagnostic tool for interpreting any individual reading. If you’re after a lab-grade DEXA scan, this isn’t it. If you want a consistent way to track how its estimates of visceral fat or skeletal muscle change over months, it’s a genuinely useful tool.
That “consistent” part matters, and it’s where I hit my own oddity: even after resetting the calibration, the Nova and my older single-frequency scale read from 1kg to 2kg apart on my weight. Neither is necessarily ‘wrong’ as such. Different weighing hardware, calibration and measurement conditions can produce differences in weight between devices. For the body-composition figures, different electrode configurations and algorithms introduce another source of variation. (I couldn’t make them fight over it via Bluetooth …ha!) The bottom line here is that if you use one scale, you’ll almost always get the same results to track your trend. (I didn’t know which one was closer to my actual weight, so obviously I chose the one that said less because Instagram tells me I should……)
Nova vs Elis 1: which one do you actually need?
Renpho’s range starts a long way below the Nova with the Elis 1, an entry-level scale that’s frequently discounted to around $40 AUD. It’s worth putting the two side by side, because the gap between them is bigger than the price difference alone suggests.
Here’s a handy “this vs that” so you can get an idea.
Both scales route through the RENPHO Health app first, and both then sync onward into Apple Health, Google Fit and Fitbit, so if your fitness tracking already lives in one of those ecosystems, neither device locks you out of it. I will add here that I’m an Apple user and only have experience with the Apple Health app, I’ve not tested the interoperability between the Renpho app and the Fitbit or Google offerings, but it certainly does pass lots of data across to the Apple Health app.
What does the data look like?
The data you get from the MorphoScan Nova is substantial! I’ve shared the data from my scan below (don’t judge! It’s a journey) and, as I’ve mentioned a couple of times in this review, while the Renpho isn’t a medical device, it’s a significant step up from a basic smart scale, and will give you some great datapoints to work on, when you use it over a period of time, rather than just as a once-off.
Where the Nova earns its price premium is the handle-based segmental analysis and the on-device display, both genuinely useful if you want a fast morning check without unlocking your phone, or if you specifically want more detailed body-composition estimates, including things like visceral fat and skeletal muscle mass.
My Verdict
If you just want a solid weight and basic-composition tracker that talks to whatever health app you already use, the Elis 1 remains excellent value and does the job without fuss. If you want the deeper metrics, visceral fat, segmental muscle and fat by limb, and a much more detailed full-body report, and you’re happy for that data to live in Renpho’s own app, the MorphoScan Nova is a well-built, genuinely capable step up. Just don’t treat either one as a medical device.
