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Philips scopes - opinions

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fenclu:
Hi

I found a bargain Philips PM3234 scope for 190 PLN (arround 50 USD). That's pretty unusual because a cheap Tektronix in Poland costs at least twice as much.

So that got me thinking - are they any good the Philips scopes?

free_electron:
Philips are pretty good. They are reasonably well built. Philips made scopes from before the time the germans came over to your country for a cup of tea...
To well in the 1990. Then they sold the division to fluke. And it got killed.

vk6zgo:
I've never been particularly fond of Philips gear,as they have very idiosyncratic ways of doing things.
This is mainly a case of "what I was brought up on"---If I was from The Netherlands I'd probably love them!

They are fairly solidly made,good performers,& are reasonably easy to work on.
Also,being in Europe,even if you need special parts,they don't have to come from the other side of the world! :D

grumpydoc:
I have a PM3382 (2+2 channel 100MHz combiscope) which I use as my day-to-day 'scope and on the whole I'm pretty happy with it. The digital side isn't all that great (2x 100Ms/s and fairly short buffer) but the analogue side is good - in fact now I've got a faster sig gen I discovered that it will trigger up to about 500MHz! There's sod all gain left at that point, but you can get a stable trace.

The main disadvantage is that they are fairly large and heavy and not exactly light on power consumption at about 120W.

In general any of the PM338x (100MHz, combiscope), PM339x (200MHz combiscope), PM3082 (100Mhz analogue) or PM309x (analogue 200MHz)  scopes are fairly good - I think these were among the last of the Philips 'scopes before they went to Fluke.

The slightly earlier 'scopes with LCD readouts the PM3055/PM3065/PM3070 etc are also worth having.

I have a couple of earlier models the PM3264's (100MHz 4 channel) but I need some time on the bench to get these going. All I can say is that they are even more "substantial" in their construction than the later 'scopes.

There are also several Philips 'scopes that aren't really worth having. The early digital models have very low sample rates and aren't, I understand, all that easy to get going if they fail. There are also a lot of low bandwidth Philips 'scopes kicking around on ebay which aren't very interesting - I'd be inclined to put the 3234 in this category as it is only 10MHz.

You should be able to do better for 50 euros or so.

david77:
I'm not a big fan of Philips consumer products but the test equipment seems fairly decent.
I've got the PM3212 2 channel 25MHz scope that I had to fix some time ago. There's very little unobtanium in there, as long as the HV side works these scopes should always be repairable.
This particular scope is interesting as it's mains isolated and can even be powered from 12VDC. So no need for an isolation transformer wich could be handy in some situations.

I wouldn't bother with a 10MHz scope though, I bet you could find something better.

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