How good is the Rigol equipment for production ?
Does anybody have experience with them ?
The probable equipment we will get:
- Oscilloscopes.
- Signal generators.
- Power supplies.
I appreciate any help on the topic.
David.
How many scopes, sig gens, and power supplies are you considering? One or two of each, a few, several, or a bunch?
How many hours per day will they be used? How much tender loving care will this gear receive vs. how much "don't care/rough use/abuse" might it receive?
How often can you afford to have a piece of test equipment out of operation and for how long?
The more stringent the requirements the more you might need to consider where you will get service and how good/fast that service will be. That might lean you toward Keysight, Tektronix, or maybe a few others of the majors - but even with the majors you might have to rely on shipping the equipment for repair depending on where you are and where the vendor provides service. (Others here can tell you about each brand in terms of what you might expect for turnaround time once you send something out for service - this might be a key question for you to research. If turnaround time is really important you might try contacting each vendor to see what the experience is like before the sale; it generally doesn't get a lot better after the sale.)
On the other hand, if you are going to need several or a bunch of each type of test equipment you could probably save some money with Rigol and just factor in a spare unit for each model. Personally, I don't think Rigol is likely to fail all that much more often than the "majors", especially if your users treat the gear with care; if they don't care I'm not sure Rigol offers quite the same industrial durability of some of the "majors" - again you'll get plenty of opinions here. Either way, having a spare unit might be good even if you buy from the majors if you can't afford to have the equipment down.
It might come down to "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM/AT&T/Fill in the Blank". No doubt, sometimes people can get talked into a situation where "you can buy better but you can't pay more." Kind of depends on what you need and value, and whether the strategy emphasizes playing to win, or not to lose.
Hard to say without knowing more about your requirements for functionality, performance, and service - but if you can say more about what is top of mind for you there are lots of people here who will weigh-in with their thoughts and advice. (There are lots of users of Rigol, Agilent/Keysight, Tektronix, and other products in this forum - you've come to a good place to ask.)