Products > Test Equipment

DSOX1204G 200Mhz vs Used MSO3014A (Calibrated in 2018)

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bdunham7:

--- Quote from: nctnico on October 28, 2021, 09:20:26 pm ---I've had no problem trying a GW Instek GDS2204E for over a month.

--- End quote ---

OK, perhaps things are different there.  That doesn't help here--I don't know of any dealers that will provide demos for stuff like that and the only other alternative is to abuse seller return policies, such as Amazon's 30-day period for alleged defects.  Otherwise the buyer is going to be paying for shipping, perhaps in both directions.  And to add to that, it appears at first glance the the MSO/AWG promotion is only available directly from Siglent.  Anyway, it wouldn't matter to me--I really prefer a 6-month or longer test period because I'm only an occasional user and it takes me that long to really get used to things and discover annoyances.

Martin72:

--- Quote from: kcbrown on October 27, 2021, 10:47:46 pm ---The Siglent 2000X+ scope is an incredible scope for its price range.  But good as it is, there's no way it can match a Keysight 3000 series scope except perhaps for noise floor
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Examples ?


On work I use the HDO6000 and WR9000 from lecroy daily and of course there are some advantages between them and the SDS2K+ I got at home.
But from time to time I´m surprised how less they are in relation to the price of the lecroy scopes, what general purposes concerns.
So I´m curious about the advantages of the keysight.


Electro Fan:

--- Quote from: 2N3055 on October 28, 2021, 08:09:36 pm ---
--- Quote from: erwets on October 28, 2021, 07:40:38 pm ---
--- Quote from: bdunham7 on October 28, 2021, 03:59:35 pm ---One thing that occurs to me is that for your $2800, you could buy the base Keysight DSOX1204G and the Siglent SDS2104X-Plus w/ logic probe.
...

If you hate it, sell it and upgrade the Keysight.

--- End quote ---

Not a bad idea! However, I'm not sure that the resale value of the 2104X will hold up. Any chance you have some experience in this area and/or can comment on used 2104X prices? Otherwise, I'm just going to semi-trust ebay :)

--- End quote ---

I am dead serious. You'll want to keep both. You'll love Keysight if you want CRT emulation. But once you try SDS2104X+ and if you give it time to learn how to use it you will want that one too, for all the stuff Keysight simply doesn't have. Really, those two combined are very powerful combination..

--- End quote ---

+1

I think these two would be complimentary and it’s almost always good to have two pieces of equipment to check one against the other.  Both of these will suffer some depreciation after being used but there will almost for sure be some decent resale value for both.  The alternative if you really just want one or the other is to arrange to have both arrive the same day/week after making sure you can return them within 2-4 weeks.  My guess is having them side you might see a reason to keep both but if not you will be pretty clear on which one to return.

Edit:  or you might decide to send them both back and go all in on some other higher end oscilloscope.

kcbrown:

--- Quote from: bdunham7 on October 28, 2021, 02:39:55 pm ---
--- Quote from: kcbrown on October 28, 2021, 10:21:16 am ---I mean, this is an issue you'd have even on the SDS2000X series.  Once you make the timebase long enough you can't maintain the native sample rate.  The additional memory helps, of course, but doesn't eliminate the issue.

--- End quote ---

You never eliminate the issue, but making it 200X better goes a long way!  Even the $500 SDS1104X-E can do up to a one million X zoom, something the Keysight models here won't despite their 'MegaZOOM' trademark.

--- End quote ---

That's certainly true.   Ultimately, though, it depends on at what point the limitations are no longer tolerable.

It should be clear that despite the Keysight's limitations here, it works well enough for enough people that it sells reasonably well.  And as noted by others, the Keysights do a good job of reducing (if not outright eliminating) aliasing artifacts.



--- Quote ---Perhaps, but I don't understand making significant sacrifices in actual capability for that 'luxury feel' UX, especially for someone spending their own money. 

--- End quote ---

It just depends on what you value and whether or not the reduction in capability will actually be a meaningful one for what you're going to be doing with it.

You shouldn't underestimate the importance of a good UI.  An unresponsive UI is frustrating.  Yes, you can work around it or just live with it, but as soon as you use something that's truly responsive, you'll instinctively be reluctant to go back to using the unresponsive UI.  If you've got both types of instruments, the one with the unresponsive UI will be relegated to the shelf except when its capabilities are needed for the task at hand.

The Keysight, for all its limitations, apparently does the job for the majority of situations.  If it didn't, it wouldn't sell well at all.

If Siglent fixed its UI and made it responsive, they'd clean house, because at that point there'd be no compelling reason at all to go with something like the Keysight.  I believe (without proof) that the responsiveness and polish of the Keysight is a major factor in its continuing success.



--- Quote ---My older Tek DSO has a UI that is several orders of magnitude less obtuse than the Siglent, but if I had to choose between them there would be no contest--I'll live with some amusing quirks to get the additional capability.  I'm not dismissing the issue--setting up FFT on the Siglent is like a scope comedy skit next to the Tek.  The Keysight (and Tek) models may have other advantages, but I don't know them well enough to comment.

--- End quote ---

There's a difference between a UI being "quirky" (meaning, the things you have to do to get it to do something aren't necessarily obvious at a glance) and a UI being unresponsive.  The Siglent's UI is the latter under many situations.  I don't have much trouble getting at things with it, but I do have trouble getting it to see my commands more often than I'd like.   It's mainly an issue with the handling of the front panel.  It's far more responsive to the touchscreen than to the front panel, though it still does sometimes take more time than it should to reflect the commanded changes.

EDIT, 4/2/2022: It turns out that I had hardware problems with at least the timebase encoder on the front panel, and quite possibly with some sort of connection issue between the encoder board and the rest of the scope.  As such, I have to throw out all my prior experience with the front panel responsiveness of the scope, because it could easily be that I was running into a hardware issue with my scope and not the coding of the UI.  Don't get me wrong, it's still no Keysight, but it now seems to actually respond to what I tell it to do.  See https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/new-electricalcomputer-engineer-student-test-bench-equipment-recommendations/msg4091812/#msg4091812


In any case, the point here is that the UI responsiveness is a major factor in the usability of the instrument, and usability, despite its independence from capability, has a huge effect on the willingness of the user to make use of the instrument when he has alternatives.  It also has an effect on the willingness of the user to deploy the instrument for problems where it isn't strictly necessary.  If the user dislikes using the instrument because of its UI, he'll refrain from using it unless he must.  If the user enjoys using the instrument, he'll use it even when he doesn't have to.

There's a reason Apple has been so successful over the years.  They understand (or at least understood) the importance of having a good UI.   Keysight does as well, it seems.

kcbrown:

--- Quote from: Martin72 on October 28, 2021, 09:43:12 pm ---
--- Quote from: kcbrown on October 27, 2021, 10:47:46 pm ---The Siglent 2000X+ scope is an incredible scope for its price range.  But good as it is, there's no way it can match a Keysight 3000 series scope except perhaps for noise floor
--- End quote ---

Examples ?

--- End quote ---

The sample rate of the Keysight far exceeds that of the Siglent: 5GS/s versus 2GS/s.  The Keysight can be had in bandwidths up to 1 GHz, applicable to all 4 channels simultaneously, while the Siglent is limited to 500 MHz on two channels simultaneously.  The Keysight is able to perform 1 million waveform updates per second, which is some 8x what the Siglent is capable of during normal acquisition (the Siglent has a special capture mode that can do up to 500K waveforms per second, but that's still half the Keysight's capability).  The Keysight does hardware decoding of digital signals, which I'm guessing could make a difference for triggering and possibly other things.  The Keysight is fast enough that it can do USB 2.0 protocol analysis at all speeds that USB 2.0 will support.  I don't know that the Siglent can do that, and in any case the Siglent doesn't have the analysis tools (such as protocol decoding) for it that the Keysight does.   The Keysight's mask testing speed appears reflective of its hardware-oriented nature, in that their blurb claims it can perform 270K tests per second.  This is probably an order of magnitude faster than the Siglent, if not more.

All that said, I suppose I should amend my statement somewhat.  The scopes have different capabilities.  For those that require deeper memory, the Siglent is clearly superior.  For those that require a lower noise floor, the Siglent is also clearly superior.  But I can't see anything else that the Siglent would be better at than the Keysight, when the Keysight is appropriately configured, while the Keysight appears to be better in several ways.   Maybe I'm overlooking something.  I have direct experience with the Siglent, but no direct experience with the Keysight.

It should be noted that the Siglent gives you far more capability for the price than the Keysight.  A fully decked out Keysight, new, is on the order of $20K.  Few hobbyists are going to spend that kind of money on an instrument like this.  And with respect to what the OP is looking at, obviously it's far less capable in terms of bandwidth as-is than the fully decked out variety.  But the rest of the capabilities (save for those that are bandwidth-dependent) are a matter of the software.



I do very much like the proposal of the OP getting the Siglent SDS2104X+ and a Keysight DSOX1204G.  That would be a very flexible setup for the same money.  If he isn't ever going to need 1 GHz bandwidth (which would require him to hack the 3014A at the hardware level), then that combination will get him as much as 500 MHz (via keygen) bandwidth and massive memory and, when those things aren't necessary, a very fast UI (via the Keysight).

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