Siglent SDS1102CNL Quick Review

[echen1024]

I don't have the time for a video review, although I will post that when I get it, but here is a quick review of the Siglent SDS1102CNL.

First Impressions:
As soon as you take it out of the box, there is one thing you notice. The stench of the plastic inside. I don't know if the probes melted in the UPS truck here in 100* (Houston, TX) weather, or it was made like that, but the smell is awful. Unboxing the scope, you notice that it is quite nicely packaged, with separate little pouches for the probes and manuals. The probe pouches aren't as good as the ones on the Agilent 6000 series scopes, but that's a starting price of $5,980, and this is only $300, so no complaints here. I've seen worse. The scope itself is of relatively good quality, with nice tilting feet and a snapping handle. My only complaint would be that the feet don't have rubber on the bottom, so the scope slides around a lot during set up.

The front panel:
No surprises here. A typical oscilloscope panel with separate controls for both channels, which is an improvement over the Rigol. It also has a dedicated 'single' button, which I find myself using a lot. All the knobs seem of good quality, except for the multifunction knob. I would have loved for this knob to be indented. I frequently find myself accidentally turning it when I am trying to press down on it. The same goes for the horizontal pos. When scrolling through things such as a temperature sensor transmission, it almost feels like the knob might fall off. Other than that, Dave probably loves these knobs. They're pushable! The buttons seem of reasonably good quality, though a bit on the mushy side.

Build quality:
Decent for this scope, you get what you pay for. The probes feel quite cheap, and seem to be made out of shit plastic.

Firmware/Included Software:
This scopes boots acceptably fast, at just over 10 seconds, and upon boot you are greeted with a menu to select language, which is quite annoying at times. The screen resolution is quite low, but the viewing angles are TERRIFIC! I can view the signal looking almost straight from the top and sides. The bottom angles are significantly worse, but still better than even some of the Tek's I've used in the past. The firmware on the scope is acceptable, with a couple of unintuitive functions, such as having to go into Utility, where all the system settings are, to access the recorder. I would have much preferred it as a dedicated button on the side. The menus frequently are quite confusing, and lack a back key, which pisses the hell out of me. Otherwise, the firmware is acceptable if not slow. The included software, however, is an absolute heap of shit. Sure, you can capture a waveform, but once you capture that wave form, it just sits there. Wanna change the timebase? Hell no! Position? You gotta be shitting me! The included software is absolutely useless. Just hook up a flash drive and save it onto their. Don't waste your time looking for all the settings. Seriously!

Performance:
I haven't done any serious testing, as that will be in the next segment, but I can say it's ok at best. Want 40k memory? Good luck. The max I was able to coax out was 20k. A 1 kHz square wave will start aliasing at 10ms/div. Other than that, I haven't really had the time to play around with the performance settings, but will most certainly post them when I have.

Photos:





Thanks for reading,
Eric

[johansen]

i bought this scope because i realized i could get the extra 25% screen for the same price as the much advertized 1052xx you got to be kidding me let's hack a scope's firmware 

in any case i'm pleased with the scope with the exception of a few issues.

during low sweep rates, the screen does not refresh the same way an analog scope does.
it would be awesome if you could see the signal come in, in real time, below say 30hz refresh rate, which would be about equivalent to a sweep time of 2ms/div, which is about the limit of the human eye. below this, the display should be updated as quickly as the data comes in?
its ridiculous to wait for 36milliseconds of data to come in, and then update the display, 1/2 second later, at higher sweep rates you can clearly see the display being updated at ~30+FPS


the second complaint is the lack of measurement capabilities on the math function.
it would be great if i could use this scope to calculate RMS watts (channel 1 volts, multiplied by channel 2 amps)
but i can't. instead, i'm printing the math function to the USB device, and counting pixels. big fail there.

[echen1024]

Yea, it's a very basic scope. I would love to hack it, but I'm more of a hardware person.