Agilent DSOX4034A vs Rigol DS6064

[tomazic]

Hi Guys,
I'd hate to start a "vs" topic, but the decision between these two oscilloscopes is stealing my sleep. With the agilent's "higher bandwidth for the same price" deal, the DSOX4000 series became more afordable than before. In EU, the DSOX4034A comes about 5800€ and the DS6064 is 6700€, so the Rigol is actually a bit more expensive, but I'm not bothered about the price difference that much.

The DSOX4034A has a bandwidth of 350 MHz and ships with 700 MHz probes, giving about 320 MHz effective bandwidth. The Rigol DS6064 has 600 MHz bandwidth and ships with 600 MHz probes, giving an effective bandwidth of about 420 MHz. So the difference between these two scopes is only 100 MHz, which is not that much. The Agilent has 800x600 display and the Rigol has a 800x480 display, but from what I've seen the Agilent more vertical space for status bars and buttons, so there's really not that much more space for the waveform that with the Rigol. The agilent has a function generator, but I won't need that. The Rigol has more memmory, but the Agilent seems to have a better ASIC. So what comes down to is probably the build quality and software features.

So what do you guys think, which one would you get?
Thanks!

[AndyC_772]

Based on my personal experience with an MSO-X3054A vs DS4054, I'd go straight for the Agilent without a moment's hesitation. (Actually I might well hesitate for a moment to consider whether the 4000X series was really worth paying extra for over and above the 3000X - but not to consider a Rigol).

I'd find it very hard to believe that the DS6000 series firmware has been tested, debugged and reviewed for usability to a much greater extent than the DS4000. The Rigol suffers from a few stupid UI issues that just make it less pleasant and productive to use than it could, or should be.

Things like the measurement cursors, which are quick, accurate, smooth and responsive on the Agilent, are slow and jumpy on the Rigol. My DS4054 has crashed a few times for no apparent reason. Serial decoding had stupid, obvious bugs, only some of which were fixed by a firmware update.

Normally I go by a rule of thumb which says a piece of test equipment should be 10x as reliable as the thing it's being used to debug - otherwise I just have two pieces of kit to debug rather than just one. The Agilent passes this test, the Rigol doesn't.

[quarros]

mojo-chan:

Sorry to ask but can you point me to the hack on Agilient? I thought to date that it was not hacked. Would be happy to be wrong tough...

Never mind.. Found it.

[Hydrawerk]

Normally I go by a rule of thumb which says a piece of test equipment should be 10x as reliable as the thing it's being used to debug - otherwise I just have two pieces of kit to debug rather than just one. The Agilent passes this test, the Rigol doesn't.

[kurtm]

Actually there is one other difference, the minimum volts/div setting. If you do a lot of very small signal stuff Rigol have an advantage again.

I don't think that the Rigol is very useful to measure small signals with that much noise.
Below is a screenshot of my Rigol DS4054. All Channels terminated with 50 Ohms, sensitivity set to 1mV/div.
BW limits  CH1: OFF   CH2: 200MHz    CH3:100MHz  CH4: 20MHz.

[Hydrawerk]

With Agilent you can set high resolution mode and 1mV/div. It is a digital magnification, but still useful sometimes...