Rigol DS1102D & Rigol DS1104B price drop

[0xdeadbeef]

I just wonder: both, the DS1102D and DS1104B are currently on sale for <800€ in some retail shops in Europe (not eBay or obscure Chinese dealers). This means a price drop to nearly 50% of what they were sold for not so long ago. Indeed in some shops the lesser models cost much more now than the better models (e.g. in one shop the Ds1064b costs about 1500€ and the Ds1104b about 800€ which is kinda weird).

So is this there currently some kind of special deal for these two scopes or is there something fishy going on? Or are the next models in sight and the old ones are sold out?

Honestly, I kinda toyed with the idea to get a somewhat reasonable 4ch or mixed mode scope for years now, but they were always much too expensive compared with the 2ch models. And it's not really that I urgently need it now. So I could as well wait a little longer and wait for scopes to get better and cheaper.
Then again <800€ for a reasonable 4ch 100MHz Rigol seems like a very good deal and I wonder if prices will rise again soon.

Besides: any opinions on DS1102D vs. DS1104B? 2ch seemed always too limited for me. e.g. for SPI you need at least 4 channels, but the LA features of the DS1102D are obviously not the best and in the job, I usually prefer to use analog channels over digital ones to see slopes and noise. And I rarely ever needed more than 4 channels.

[Bored@Work]

So is this there currently some kind of special deal for these two scopes

Rigol is running a special 48% deal on selected items. Why? Who knows. Maybe they need to put some lipstick on their sales figures, maybe they need to make room in the warehouse.

[0xdeadbeef]

Hm, ok. So the offers are valid I guess.
Unfortunately I overlooked that the 4ch DS1104B doesn't have the (long) record length of the 2ch models.
That's quite a shame, else this would have been a really nice bargain. The DS1102D still looks interesting for <800€.

[Simon]

yes 800 euro for a four channel 100MHz does not look bad at all whn you think that the 2 channel model is at over £500 in the UK. It is quite incredible actually, I bought my 50 MHz model for £239, got a £50 refund and then hacked it to the 100MHz model now worth over £500, treble what I paid

[0xdeadbeef]

I'm undecided. I'd jump on the DS1104B immediately if it had a little larger record length. Like 64k per channel ,but it looks it's more like 8k if all 4 channels are used.
On the other hand, the long record mode on the DS1102D seems to have several limitations as well. E.g. I'm not even sure what record length the digital channels have.

Besides, reasonable scopes from well known brands are getting close to affordable. E.g. the Hameg HMO722/724 looks really nice and the Agilent DSOX2004A and MSO2002A as well. I guess I'd better wait a little longer.

[electrodynatronic]

Thanks for posting the reference to the Hameg. I'm getting ready to replace the 'scopes in my labs. Having trouble deciding myself. I like the Hameg as a classroom demo scope since it has DVI and VGA out.

[electrodynatronic]

Salesman confirmed for me today the price drop on 'scopes "until the end of the year."