The soft x‐ray absorber‐foil technique for electron‐temperature measurements is considered. The idea is introduced to compare the signals of a surface‐barrier diode and an x‐ray‐sensitive photodiode rather than those of two identical detectors. The contrasting characteristics of the two detector types gives rise to an improvement of the temperature resolution by a factor 2 (at 0.4 keV) to 10 (at 10 keV).