Care to elaborate in what ways they're in your opinion "pretty awful"? I'm really curious as in my experience LeCroy's scopes are among the best you can find.
Certainly.
User interfaces are their biggest problems.
Dicky knobs: I've used one of the WaveAces in the past and scrolling through serial data would be a nightmare. The horizontal scroll knob was tiny, it was incredibly slow and it had zero acceleration if you spun it fast. It took half a minute of knob spinning to get to the desired location.
WaveAce? I though you wanted to tell me about probllems with the more expensive LeCroy scopes? The WaveAce isn't exactly a high end scope, and the hardware and software including the UI is 100% Siglent.
But yes, I vagely remember that the knobs were amongst the compaints with the WaveAce (especially the 100/200 models).
Cursors: Don't remember which model it was, but I remember it not being able to turn on both horizontal and vertical cursors at the same time. If you are trying to compare two points on a trace, having both pairs of cursors is crucial. Nope, not this one.
Yes, standard cursors means either horizontal or vertical, but if I remember right (never needed both cursors at the same time so I'd need to check) that is the same with Agilent/Keysight scopes.
I'm struggling however to see an application for this. What did you try to achieve?
Counter-intuitive settings: Instead of having nice and simple settings, for example three buttons to set up triggering, you have to go into overly complex menus and fiddle with the settings to get anything to show up on the screen.
Come on, setting up standard triggering on a LeCroy is child's play, really. LeCroy scopes also have (and had at least since the 9300 Series from the early 90's) hardware knobs/buttons for trigger level and operating mode, as well as a setup button which directly opens up the on-screen menu, and for standard settings it's just another press on the softkey (pre-X-Stream scopes) or the touchscreen (X-Stream scopes). It's not rocket science.
Of course it's getting more complicated for more advanced trigger (SMART Triggers) setups but that's in the nature of these things and equally involving on other scopes, if they even offer such triggers, that is.
As to getting to show something on the screen, there's the Auto Setup button which does exactly that - setting up the scope to get something on the screen which quickly gives you a starting point from where to go where you want.
Retarded memory: This was one of the WaveSurfer MXs models. I probed a signal coming from an FPGA only to have it display an almost flat trace. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out that the sample memory was too shallow to allow any kind of decent measurement. I then finally managed to figure out where to set a larger sample memory and just as I was thinking how stupid it was that the sample memory wasn't at its maximum setting by default, I realized why that was not the case. The scope became abysmally slow and only after a moment or two did the real waveform appear on the screen. Is this what one should expect from a $15k scope?
The WaveSurfer (M)Xs has automatic sample memory management which is enabled by default and which always uses enough memory to run the acquisition at the highest possible sample rate, so no, the low sample memory setting is certainly not the default for these scopes. It requires manual user action to change the memory settings, which suggests that either you or someone else fiddled with the memory management settings, and I guess you probably also didn't bother to set the scope back to defaults before starting your measurements (or someone has overwritten the default settings with their own). That is user error, not a scope problem.
And I can tell you that these things not only happen with LeCroy scopes. I stopped counting the number of times someone's measurements failed because the previous user has made some changes to the settings and the next user didn't reset it, and the labs I'm working in are predominantly Agilent/Keysight. It also happens because, while EE's generally know very well how to operate a standard scope, many EE's simply fail to recognize that operating a modern high end scope and its advanced capabilities requires that some time is spent learning how to operate the scope properly, but many EE's simply fail to do that. Your story above re. the memory settings illustrates that very well.
Again, why didn't you use Auto Setup? It would have corrected the issue immediately.
It's not that they don't work well when you eventually manage to set them up right, it just takes a whole lot of time and frustration to set up something incredibly simple. It just kills productivity and irritates you without a good reason. I have had the chance to play with many scopes over the years, but only LeCroys managed to piss me off every single time.
I'm sorry but so far I haven't heard anything that really justifies a statement like this:
If it's any consolation to you, LeCroy's expensive models are pretty awful, too.
What you've described looks very much about user error, i.e. you don't really know how to operate the scope properly. That's not meant as offense, and I've seen many EE's struggling with operating advanced high end scopes especially when they normally use simpler scopes only. But that applies to other scopes as well and is certainly not the fault of the scope.
As I said before, any advanced scope requires that the user gets acustomed with how it is operated before working with it. These are no standard scopes with a few buttons that all do more or less the same, they are pretty much advanced signal analyzers that expect the user knows what he does and how the thing operates.
You won't get very far with try & error on these scopes.
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