And you know the actual price of doing these front ends, how exactly?
No more than you do. Which is, not at all. I'm just going by what I've seen of how scope front ends work - programmed attenuator, protection, buffer, sampler, AtoD. This is such old, well established technology, and with stripline ICs and VLSI can be miniaturized so small and made so standard, that it _should_ be cheap.
And yet Tek, Agilent etc claim it isn't. We can't know their true costs, I'm just saying I don't believe they justify their low end scope pricing stuctures.
If you are right, then please explain why Agilent have entirely different front ends for the 100-200MHz models, and the 350MHz-500MHz models.
My point is that they're choosing to make the lowest end one, solely to justify the higher price of the next model up the scale. You can't argue against that by pointing out that they produce the two versions. Ultimately, neither of us can prove our opinions are true though.
And this is the company that is really milking these software options to the max.
Thus demonstrating their tendency to dishonest pricing structures.
If they could afford to put the 500MHz front end in the 100MHz, don't you think they would have done that? Instead of making you send the thing back to the factory for a mother replacement?
We're going round in circles here. No, they wouldn't, because it would reveal that they _could_ do 500MHz for less, thus pulling their whole pricing scale lower.
In fact _especially_ in digital scopes since the high bandwidth stuff is confined to the input sampling circuits, not required all the way through to a screen. There's little 'research investment' required for this kind of capability, the sampling technology is well established and the rest of a digital scope is just a PC and LCD screen. There's nothing needed but industrial case style design.
Err, it's the front end attention, protection, amplification, and noise floor over bandwidth that is the hard part!
All of which is necessarily confined to a little block of a few cubic cm behind the BNC connectors, and a design which for basic scopes does not need to be changed for years, regardless of how much they choose to mess with the overall scope packaging and UI.
That 100MHz scopes are even available from the like of Tek and HP, is more the result of them wanting to maintain a 'price/feature' scale that maintains a large price difference across their range. For the purpose of retaining a seeming justification for the medium to high prices. It's a pricing spectrum solely driven by marketing considerations, not actual engineering and manufacturing cost factors.
Yes, but that does NOT extend to 500MHz like you have claimed is cheap to do. In the case of the Agilent for example, that is only true up to 200MHz. The 70MHz and 100MHz are software crippled.
It costs a lot more to do a 500MHz than it does to do a 200MHz front end, which is why they physically put different front ends in the thing and charge a lot more for it.
And once again, you are not factoring in the profit they have to make to recoup the large R&D expenditure to develop these scopes.
And you're pretending that there's been any actual R&D needed in the last 10 years for any kind of scope below 500MHz. Are you serious? What R&D? They don't even have to develop the processor designs any more, since they are likely Intel PC reference designs, just adapted a little to fit the form factor. It's ALL just industrial design, making the boxes look nice, changing around the probe interface connectors, improving the software for waveform display.
"70MHz, 100MHz" Bah. If the people responsible for this insult were around 20 years ago, we'd have had to pay money to slide the "Full/20MHz" bandwidth switch on old analog scopes.
You have no idea how much they are making on the baseline units for example. Would that alone be enough to keep the company afloat and innovating?
If the answer is yes, then you may have a valid point. But if it's not enough, and they are relying on the larger profit margins from the higher end models, then you are wrong.
And neither do you. Also you're forgetting the 'make them cheaper and you'll sell more' rule. Not to mention other advantages to society if more people could afford basic electronic test equipment.
You're distorting my argument, to make it invalid. I didn't say 'full functionality at lowest possible price'. That makes it sound like I was saying there should be 20GHz scopes for $500. But what I said was, companies like Tek & HP, that have fully mastered the technology of high bandwidth scopes, only offer scopes under 500MHz as an artificial way of maintaining a wider price spectrum. They _could_ just drop that pretense, and offer scopes of 500MHz (at least) as their low cost low end models. If they wanted to.
Sure, but can they do it at an affordable and sustainable price?
Do you have inside info on the numbers?
The 500MHz front end cost them more than the 200MHz front end, and that's a fact.
How do you know? Also, even if it does, how could you know that the 500MHz version they make, wasn't deliberately targeted to a cost range, rather than designed to make it as cheaply as possible? Plus, what would be the volume savings if they were selling more of them due to NOT making the 200MHz one?
It's very naive to assume that corporations, even ones we as EEs instinctively want to support, never let their overriding imperative (maximizing profits) lead them into reasoning that is really quite evil on some levels.
Or, are you saying it's reasonable to use low end scope sales (at artificially high prices) to subsidize the R&D for high end scopes? It sounds like you are.
How do you know the prices are "artificially" high? Do you have numbers to back that up?
Sigh. No of course not. I'm presenting a line of reasoning, based on perceived actions (software crippled bandwidths, and that 200MHz scope models even exist so long after tech for much higher bandwidths should have become standard baseline products) that suggests the pricing structures are artificial.
Then there's several other cans of worms such as the destruction of traded-in equipment, to maintain market price/demand for new models.
You'll get no argument from me there.
I have video footage of a whole bunch of nice scopes that must be destroyed by order of De Führer
Ouch. But I recall you telling me that kind of thing didn't happen in Australia; the reason there's little 2nd hand testgear available is just that out market is so much smaller. Nothing to do with significantly more insane rules/Führers here.
You should publish it, with names and addresses. But I guess you can't, or you would have already.