As demonstrated in this article, a simple test instrument is sufficient to unravel the mysteries of the cryptic and impossibly small print often found on capacitors.Besides the obvious advantages of space savings, the miniaturisation of electronic components has a couple of dark sides too. Until about ten years ago, there used to be plenty of room on capacitor bodies to print the capacitance value, the tolerance, operating voltage, manufacturer code and other salient information. Today’s capacitors, being much smaller in size, have illegible, incredibly small and cryptic print on them and before fitting such a capacitor you are well advised to measure the actual capacitance! Rocket science? Well, no. The good news is that this article describes a low-cost and extremely simple instrument to do just that.