Creating the scope screenshots

[barry14]

As a newcomer, I have been impressed with the high quality oscilloscope screenshots on this forum.  Can someone explain how these screenshots are created with the PNG format.

[TSL]

Hi Barry,

Those screen shots come directly from the scopes. Most modern scopes, SA's etc. have a USB port to plug into the PC that makes a screen capture easy. Those of us with GPIB older units can still capture screens, albeit in monochrome, provided we have GPIB cards in our PC's.

regards

Tim

[Rory]

I believe Teneyes' animated scope capture gifs are made with Marmad's RUU software.  Impressive.

[David_AVD]

On my Rigol DS1054Z you just press the print button and it saves the current screen to the (FAT32 formatted) USB stick plugged in.

[Radio Tech]

My OWON pds6062s has this feature.  But for some reason on the pc I am using it saves only a blank screen shot. Really have to troubleshoot that one day.

[HighVoltage]

On some older Fluke and Tek scopes, I have to use a Serial interface to capture the screen and it takes a long time for each screenshot.
On those older systems it is much easier and faster to grab the vector information of the trace and just update the trace instead of a complete
screenshot. It is so much easier on the new scopes with a USB drive and we almost take it for granted. It was a very different game 20 years ago.

[kolbep]

For an analogue scope, it is almost impossible to capture a trace with a cellphone or cheap camera.
You will just see the point where the dot is, and a bit of the previous phospher trail..

You need a camera that you can set to have a very long shutter period,
then you need to stabilise it (on a tripod, or some other way),
and then use the timer, so that you are not touching the camera when it takes the shot.

[Sbampato12]

For an analogue scope, it is almost impossible to capture a trace with a cellphone or cheap camera.
You will just see the point where the dot is, and a bit of the previous phosphor trail..

You need a camera that you can set to have a very long shutter period,
then you need to stabilise it (on a tripod, or some other way),
and then use the timer, so that you are not touching the camera when it takes the shot.

Very common on old setups for experiments...

Today it is very easier. Some scopes have the LAN connection too, that allow you to remote take the screenshot... 

[denelec]

In the "good old times", there were special cameras for screen capture.
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_kw=Tektronix+Oscilloscope+Camera+C

I once used my digital camera (Canon Powershot S200) to capture waveforms on my old analog Hitachi V212.
Worked well. This camera allowed you to manually set the shutter from 1 second to 15 seconds.

[barry14]

Thanks for all of the information in response to my query.  I have an OWON SDS6062 (V) scope.  While the scope is good, the supplied software is not.  There is no way to get a screenshot.  However, based on the responses, I formatted a USB flashdrive for FAT32 and used the SAVE function on the scope.  That works fine and I get the screenshots I wanted.