A Tektronix 1072b made for the education market. I have to preface this: Tektronix did a fantastic job with the interface. The whole thing has an intuition to it that's fantastic. The different colors are presented beautifully. The fact that the knob has a light that indicates it needs to be used to change the settings is really clever. Seeing the instantaneous measured frequency onscreen is similarly fantastic, and having a live FFT is the meat and potatoes. Seeing a slow signal populate across the screen; fantastic. Same with the silent design. No fan, no heat, just signals.
I say all that, because. Wow is it a pain in the ass to use compared to my analog/solid state 2230. Just from startup: the 2230 is on in about 5 seconds, the tektronix.... sit back, relax, there's a full boot sequence waiting to happen. The interface on this digital thing is also a total disaster. Manually setting a scale hunting a signal; it easily takes 5 seconds for the scale to update. It's so easy to fly past the scale setting you want. It's the same story with every. single. function. There's no obvious indicator that the trigger is set to channel 2. Trying to decipher that takes forever. For a lot of things (AC vs Ground vs DC) requires going into a submenu that again, 5 seconds every time you do anything. There is no guess and check, there is know, push, and wait. Getting the beam centered around zero, I couldn't find a quick way to do it, and the ridiculously slow update meant trying to set it back where you wanted could put an autistic person over the edge and into the facilities. There's no fast way of knowing what the current settings on the scope are. There's no fast way to do anything with this scope. On the 2230, it's a matter of seconds between starting the scope, click click click, boom I have the signal onscreen. The buttons are all physical, the screen updates at the literal speed of light, if I get completely lost, I can quickly try each and every setting to see what/where it's at and go from there. It's easier MUCH easier to pick up small nuances in a signal or what you're measuring.
Unreal, and this doesn't even get into the whole feel of using the thing. I know that doesn't matter in this day and age, but it just didn't feel right.
Idk. I was expecting better. There's very little information on which digital scopes are actually good. Can I hook my 2230 up to a computer and quickly/easily do any of the math I might want?