Help to chose 4 oscilloscopes for 2500usd togeather.

[BMOE]

Hi.
I have got a task from my boss to chose 4 oscilloscopes with a budget of 2500usd for all of them. I know that it's a tough price and my first question was if it was 2500usd each, but it wasn't.
Prefferably two of them can be a bit better and the two others a bit worse
Do you have any suggestions of best bang for the buck?

Regards
/Matias

[Fungus]

"Best bang Per Buck" is easy: The Rigol DS1054Z

But you'd have $900 left over - we can't have that, can we?

If we split the difference two ways you can buy two DS1054Zs and two others for $850 each. There really isn't much in the $850 price range that's a whole lot better than the DS1054Z.

Maybe better to get three DS1054Zs and spend $1300 on something else. With $1300 you can go up to the next level in bandwidth and screen size but you won't get many bells or whistles.

Maybe it would be good to have an idea of what they'll be used for.

[nctnico]

The $1300 ballpark gets you a 4 channel GW Instek GDS2000E series. Perhaps you could make a package deal with a test equipment dealer. However the risk of buyer 1 good and 3 bad oscilloscopes is that the 3 bad ones will be left in a corner and people fight for the good oscilloscope.

[Fungus]

The $1300 ballpark gets you a 4 channel GW Instek GDS2000E series. Perhaps you could make a package deal with a test equipment dealer. However the risk of buyer 1 good and 3 bad oscilloscopes is that the 3 bad ones will be left in a corner and people fight for the good oscilloscope.

I wouldn't describe the DS1054Z as "bad", it does a fine job of being a 4-channel general purpose oscilloscope.

But yeah, there's a danger of one person monopolizing the more expensive scope and causing interpersonal tensions in the office.

[Fungus]

Maybe you can split it between "different" 'scopes, not better/worse.

eg. Two Rigol DS1054Zs and two R&S HMO1002s.

A (hacked) DS1054Z will have more channels and bandwidth than the R&S, the R&S will be smaller and cuter than the Rigol.

Some people will prefer one, some will prefer the other - less overall fighting! 

[borjam]

I wouldn't describe the DS1054Z as "bad", it does a fine job of being a 4-channel general purpose oscilloscope.

Depending on your purpose it can be terrible or terrific. The devil is in the details

[tautech]

Hi.
I have got a task from my boss to chose 4 oscilloscopes with a budget of 2500usd for all of them. I know that it's a tough price and my first question was if it was 2500usd each, but it wasn't.
Prefferably two of them can be a bit better and the two others a bit worse
Do you have any suggestions of best bang for the buck?

Regards
/Matias

Welcome to the forum BMOE

For accurate recommendations we need more info to help with your selection.
4 general bench DSO's?
BW?
# channels?

General description of the type of duties they will need to fulfill.

[BMOE]

We have products which use very high frequency stuff, like USB3, 10Gbe, PCIe gen3 and so on, and of cource we can not use these DSOs for that so yes, it would be general purpose, measuring DC-DC ripple, rise/fall times and so on. Most of the times we only need one channel, but atleast one DSO with 4ch would be nice.

[Fungus]

it would be general purpose, measuring DC-DC ripple, rise/fall times and so on.

There's two whole cans of worms, right there... 

[tautech]

We have products which use very high frequency stuff, like USB3, 10Gbe, PCIe gen3 and so on, and of cource we can not use these DSOs for that so yes, it would be general purpose, measuring DC-DC ripple, rise/fall times and so on. Most of the times we only need one channel, but atleast one DSO with 4ch would be nice.

Surely your boss would've given you some guidelines.....or are specs up to you? 
Without a better idea of what you'd like I wonder if he's setting you up for a fall. 

IMO for lab/repair shop general purpose use BW should be 100+ MHz.
Would you need things like Decode, Function Gen or MSO ?
If you do and HV work a 400V input rated DSO could also be worth considering.

[Martini]

Hum...
1 "refurbished" analog Tektronix
3 Rigol


No?

[Wuerstchenhund]

1 "refurbished" analog Tektronix
3 Rigol

Seriously? How about

0 analog boat anchors that have been obsolete for almost two decades now and are pretty much unsupportable, plus lack even the most basic features found in any DSO like storage or measurements?
4 Rigols

Rigol scopes aren't exactly stellar but even the cheap-ass DS1054z is a much more capable scope than any old analog banger.

[wraper]

4x 2 channel GDS-2072E GW instek. There is a discount right now on them. http://www.tequipment.net/Instek/GDS-2072E/Digital-Oscilloscopes/?v=0 Various decodiong options already there so no need for hacking (unlikely that company will bother with this crap) or buying options to get a decent functionality. Or add a bit of money and get 4 x 4CH ones. Where are you located BTW, USA?
DS1054z are popular because of hacking bandwidth and decode options but it is not a very good scope IMO, especially for a company.

[Fungus]

Hum...
1 "refurbished" analog Tektronix
3 Rigol

No?

I'll go with "No".

0 analog boat anchors that have been obsolete for almost two decades now and are pretty much unsupportable, plus lack even the most basic features found in any DSO like storage or measurements?
4 Rigols

Sounds like a better option to me.

Me? I'd get one DS1054Z for evaluation. Check it out, try it for a week on your signals, see if it's up to the job (it most likely is).

Then take it from there. You might end up just buying 4 of them, you might end up with 3 of those and one more expensive one. The point is you haven't committed all your budget to a single decision without trying something first.

DS1054z are popular because of hacking bandwidth and decode options but it is not a very good scope IMO, especially for a company.

In what way are GW instek any better?

[wraper]

In what way are GW instek any better?

In almost every way. Faster response. 1mpts FFT (FFT in 1000Z is a joke), more waveforms per second. Better true sensitivity. Decoding already included. No crapxon in the PSU, japanese caps instead.

[Fungus]

In what way are GW instek any better?

In almost every way.

Every way, except... less bandwidth, less channels, less memory, no trigger out, no graduated display, no fine horizontal/vertical settings ... and all the other ways listed here: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/gw-instek-gds-2000e-released/

Obviously it's going to be better at some things - it costs more even with a special sale price, but it's not miraculously better. I'm more interested in why you claim the DS1054z is a bad scope "for a company". What does a company have to do with it?

(And why wouldn't the R&S scopes score higher than GW-I in all your criteria for a similar price?)

[nctnico]

In what way are GW instek any better?

In almost every way. Faster response. 1mpts FFT (FFT in 1000Z is a joke), more waveforms per second. Better true sensitivity. Decoding already included. No crapxon in the PSU, japanese caps instead.

And lets not forget: higher samplerate and no bugs! IMHO you should get a scope which is bug free (at least without the ridiculous bugs the DS1000Z series has) in a professional environment otherwise people will end up chasing ghosts especially if they aren't daily oscilloscope users. Measurement results should be reliable otherwise a scope will cost more than it's own purchase price quickly. For a company a tool must make money!

@Fungus: the GDS2000E series has intensity grading. You can actually adjust that in several ways by setting the intensity and fade-out time!

[rf-loop]

@Fungus: the GDS2000E series has intensity grading. You can actually adjust that in several ways by setting the intensity and fade-out time!

This kind of intensity grading...well well..

Then also old Owon SDS7102 have.

Up to this time I have think variable fade out time persistence and intensity gradient display is bit different things...but always learn new things.

[nctnico]

@Fungus: the GDS2000E series has intensity grading. You can actually adjust that in several ways by setting the intensity and fade-out time!

This kind of intensity grading...well well..

Then also old Owon SDS7102 have.

Up to this time I have think variable fade out time persistence and intensity gradient display is bit different things

From a functional point of view intensity grading and persistence are very closely related. Both keep multiple past acquisitions on screen for a while.

[Howardlong]

The DS1054Z has intensity grading or am I missing some aspect of it that's being referred to?

Regarding FFT, perhaps I'm in a minority, but practically speaking I find the FFT feature on pretty much any scope I've used is of limited value. Nice to look at, and occasionally useful, but generally I find it remains unused: I think it's mostly a rather overrated feature for real life use.

Happy to be educated on why I should be using the FFT on a scope instead of a spec an.

[nctnico]

Happy to be educated on why I should be using the FFT on a scope instead of a spec an.

FFT on a scope will work from DC so it is usable for low frequency measurements where a typical spectrum analyser starts from 9kHz or more. I have used this to measure the frequency response of communications related gear. I have also used FFT to look at the spectrum of part of a signal in order to understand which part of a signal causes an EMC problem. In this case time domain and frequency domain where very much intertwined.

[borjam]

The DS1054Z has intensity grading or am I missing some aspect of it that's being referred to?

It does, although a bit limited. Especially the infinite persistence mode can be useful to spot glitches and judge the presence of jitter and its maximum magnitude, although the limited grading will limit its value to assess which are the most common occuring values or shapes, which can be much easier in scopes with 256 levels, and, especially, in those which use different colors to create a sort of "heat map".

Regarding FFT, perhaps I'm in a minority, but practically speaking I find the FFT feature on pretty much any scope I've used is of limited value. Nice to look at, and occasionally useful, but generally I find it remains unused: I think it's mostly a rather overrated feature for real life use.

The FFT in these Chinese scopes is mostly a "check-box" thing. But look at the FFT available in higher end scopes and it can indeed be useful. My other DSO is a venerable LeCroy 9400 which I must recap, and it has an awesome FFT. True, calculating it can take even 30 seconds (yikes!) but you can get really detail information from it. It shouldn't be difficult for Rigol to replicate that, given the speed offered by the processors in these modern DSOs (the 9400 has a Motorola 68000) but, well, it seems they won't bother.

The 9400 lets you choose the number of points, wether you want the modulus, real or imaginary part, etc. Yep, the Physics background it quite apparent

Although an 8 bit converter has a very limited resolution, a good FFT can help you spot distortion problems, for instance.

[Howardlong]

Happy to be educated on why I should be using the FFT on a scope instead of a spec an.

FFT on a scope will work from DC so it is usable for low frequency measurements where a typical spectrum analyser starts from 9kHz or more. I have used this to measure the frequency response of communications related gear. I have also used FFT to look at the spectrum of part of a signal in order to understand which part of a signal causes an EMC problem. In this case time domain and frequency domain where very much intertwined.

I guess I don't do much down at audio to need to worry about that ;-) but equally the first thing that comes to mind is to use a sound card solution which would have far greater resolution and dynamic range although granted not as convenient. I guess that's my point really: the FFT offerings on scopes are typically low in terms of resolution and dynamic range, and a scope's noise floor is very high. For EMC, I can't imagine ever using a scope instead of an SA myself, for the reasons I just mentioned. The only time I've used the FFT function on a scope recently for real work is on the NCO peripheral in a PIC, but even then I ended up using an SA.

[Wuerstchenhund]

Regarding FFT, perhaps I'm in a minority, but practically speaking I find the FFT feature on pretty much any scope I've used is of limited value. Nice to look at, and occasionally useful, but generally I find it remains unused: I think it's mostly a rather overrated feature for real life use.

I guess this is because you've never used a scope with a proper FFT implementation, and it's true that especially on many entry-level scopes FFT pretty much sucks.

Happy to be educated on why I should be using the FFT on a scope instead of a spec an.

Aside from getting a spectrum of very low frequency signals (most SA's start at 9kHz or even in the MHz range), FFT can be useful for analyzing pulsed and or frequency hopping signals which a conventional swept SA often has problem capturing because of the band sweep and the low dwell time (which a modern SA gets around by using - FFT  ).

A good(!) scope is also more flexible in terms of frequency resolutions, which on most SAs are usually limited to fixed settings at between 10Hz and 5MHz while FFT on the scope can go below 1Hz or way beyond 5MHz (which helps analyzing wide bandwidth signals).

The main reason however is that FFT is part of the scope, i.e. you don't need another device to look at the frequency domain. And not everyone has a spectrum analyzer.

[wraper]

Every way, except... less bandwidth

You need to hack 1054Z first (usually no go for a company), otherwise instek has more bandwidth.

less memory

Well, unless you hack 1054Z, they are on par with single channel used. If using multiple, GDS-2000E beats it as it has 10Mpts per channel. Also that memory in Rigol is not so usefull at all. Sample rate in GW instek also does not drop when multiple channels used.

I'm more interested in why you claim the DS1054z is a bad scope "for a company". What does a company have to do with it?

Unless you hack it, there are no goodies because of which people buy it. If compared with not hacked DS-1054Z, you can buy instek GDS-1054B scope as well. It will be certainly better than not hacked DS-1054Z with the same price.