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Are 'premium' scope brands still justified?
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2N3055:

--- Quote from: Keysight DanielBogdanoff on April 17, 2024, 08:18:54 pm ---Personally, as someone who uses/has used basically all the scopes, using some brand's scopes annoys me...

--- End quote ---

Yep, I will sign that sentence !!

Good to hear from you!!
AndyC_772:
Hi Daniel, thanks for stopping by, it's interesting to hear a manufacturer's viewpoint - and as you can hopefully tell, I'm still a big fan of my MSO-X3000A scopes. Until fairly recently, wouldn't have considered trading them for anything else. I've also recommended them to others who have gone on to purchase their own too, and as far as I know, they're very happy too.

However... I'm not sure I'd agree with your comment that it's the 'B' brands who are "stuck at that level of performance".

I've no doubt that when the current MegaZoom ASIC was developed, it was a state-of-the-art, fit for purpose solution to the problem of how to build a solid, responsive and reliable everyday bench scope. But that was really rather a long time ago now, and it's entirely reasonable to suggest that what may have needed an ASIC back then might be equally well done in an FPGA today.

Moreover, an ASIC is inherenltly a snapshot in time, lots of NRE and no real ability to incrementally improve it year on year, whereas with off-the-shelf components there's always the option to move to this year's hot new device, and provided it's still programmed in Verilog, VHDL, C, or whatever, that migration is much less costly.

I'd expect scopes made that way to get meaningfully more capable year on year, while those built on ASICs don't - and that's exactly what seems to have happened. If the 3000G series really is, as I've heard it described, "just the 3000T with APPBUNDL included", that's just a lick of paint and a tweak to the pricing structure - not really progress as such.

That pricing does warrant highlighting in the context of today's market. Whether the cost is in the options or the base price of the scope, 3000G is still priced way higher than, say, the new Siglent 3000X-HD for equivalent bandwidth. £5200 (call it £6k with the digital cable plus a few options for a typical configured unit) vs £17899 for 1GHz puts the Keysight at about 3x the price, for technology that must be 10 yrs old by now.

That, surely, warrants justification, and I think I'm right to ask if a 3000G is still a good choice for a small business.

As it happens, the (unopened) SDS804X-HD that's currently sitting on my desk was also about 1/3 the cost of the various Keysight 1000 series scopes we have dotted around the lab. (Coincidence?)

I don't doubt there's cool new stuff in the pipeline, but as a mere end-user I've not seen it yet. Something like a '3500G' series, based on the 3000G platform but updated with a 12 bit front end, 100 M points / channel, and priced at a level which isn't totally blind to what's been coming out of China the last few years? Sign me up.
nctnico:
Still, one of the rather unique features of the Keysight oscilloscopes is that these can decode across segments. When recording a bunch of segments, the decode table shows data from all segments (with timestamps ofcourse!) in one so you can hop through the various segments with ease. On other oscilloscopes I've seen/used so far you'll need to go through each segment and look at the decoded data for that specific segment; there is typically not an easy way to aggregate all decoded data.
2N3055:

--- Quote from: nctnico on April 18, 2024, 09:00:42 am ---Still, one of the rather unique features of the Keysight oscilloscopes is that these can decode across segments. When recording a bunch of segments, the decode table shows data from all segments in one so you can hop through the various segments. On other oscilloscopes I've seen/used so far you'll need to go through each segment and look at the decoded data for that specific segment; there is typically not an easy way to aggregate all decoded data.

--- End quote ---

That is a good point.
But if you need to do that a lot, Picoscope does that and to level no embedded scope does.

And for the price of MSOX 3104G you can buy several Siglent and Picoscope scopes(or whatever your favourite brand is) at the same time.

Martin72:

--- Quote ---Something like a '3500G' series, based on the 3000G platform but updated with a 12 bit front end, 100 M points / channel, and priced at a level which isn't totally blind to what's been coming out of China the last few years?
--- End quote ---

If you have dominated the market for decades together with 2...3 others, I can well imagine that you can react rather sluggishly to the cheaper competition from the East.
Or want to.
This wasn't necessary in the early years either, firstly because the quality of the devices didn't even come close to their own products, and secondly because they had a customer base.
But in the meantime, something has grown up that could cause problems for the major suppliers.
The future will show whether they will ignore this and continue to rely on their customer base, or whether they will actually be willing to counter it.
And we're not talking about ambitious hobbyists who want to invest more than €500.
For example, if I can get a Siglent 2000XHD/3000XHD today that is just as good as a scope that costs €10000....15000, then I don't have to think twice - as a company.
I had equipped our department with scopes that together cost as much as ONE Waverunner.
And we won't be the only ones who have done this or are thinking of doing so.
Can you afford to ignore the cheaper competition in the long term?
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