LeCroy Wavestation

[0xdeadbeef]

Shame on LeCroy:

http://www.lecroy.com/wavestation/?mid=1043
http://siglent.com/en/product_show.asp?articleid=156

Now rebranding Chinese stuff is common and LeCroy did it and still does it for the very low end scopes, but selling a blackish version of a very low end arbitrary signal generator for about 5 times the price is a bit, eh ... brave.
Even if they completely reworked the firmware - which I kinda doubt.

Couldn't they at least rebrand an Owon, Rigol or Hantek?
Well, I really love their higher end WaveRunner/WaveSurfer scopes, but they seem to work hard on ruining the brand's reputation with this kind of crap...

[olsenn]

I got a WaveAce102 for free and I don't mind it at all -- although i would never pay $800 for it (it's worth about $200 - $300). I think these are sold more to companies who use the higher end Lecroy equipment and just by the low end Lecroy's when they need them, without looking around for better prices. Who cares when it's someone else's money right???

[BravoV]

Looking at the screen, doubt Lec did major rework on the firmware, only the color I guess. 

Lec


Siglent

[saturation]

Thanks for these.  Its always been speculated Atten/Siglent builds for LeCroy and others [ e.g. Tek], for some gear, this is good evidence for it.  Now if a tear down shows the PCB has Siglent/Atten/or its parents ODM on it, it would be harder proof.

[amyk]

Looking at the screen, doubt Lec did major rework on the firmware, only the color I guess. 

And a bit of the UI styling, but even the fonts are the same on the buttons. They also switched around channel 1 and 2

[EEVblog]

It's Lecroy Black, that's gotta be better, right? 

Dave.

[BravoV]

It's Lecroy Black, that's gotta be better, right? 

Dave.

Yeah, you prolly right, that proprietary Lecroy's secret black paint will radiate the heat generated inside the box better and the unit will run cooler, of course this extra feature alone worth the price different significantly. 

[sotos]

It's Lecroy Black, that's gotta be better, right? 

Dave.

I think black, looks more professionally. The other one looks like a toy.
If I had to choose between them, I would have taken the black one.

[0xdeadbeef]

Still they should have come up with something to rival the brilliant Agilent 33521A/33522A and ended up instead with painting a crap Chinese toy black but charging the price of a mid end genuine LeCroy product. Most probably another bad example of marketing duds taking over an engineering company ...
I just hope they don't ruin the brand with this nonsense.

[Teknotronix]

The black with the blue buttons does look sexy.

Seeing that a company like LeCroy is putting their name on those siglent devices, I don't feel so bad about buying one of the 20MHz siglent models off ebay.

[nctnico]

Still they should have come up with something to rival the brilliant Agilent 33521A/33522A and ended up instead with painting a crap Chinese toy black but charging the price of a mid end genuine LeCroy product. Most probably another bad example of marketing duds taking over an engineering company ...
I just hope they don't ruin the brand with this nonsense.

Lecroy is a B-brand compared to Agilent and Tektronix for a long time. Just look at the build quality of their stuff. Its just a bunch of parts (preferably COTS) crammed into a housing.

[0xdeadbeef]

Apart from the fact that LeCroy is said to have invented the digital storage oscilloscope, I would never ever trade in a Lecroy WaveSurfer/WaveRunner for an Agilent or Tektronix DSO. Maybe Yokogawa or R&S have something better in the very high end segment, but e.g. the Agilent MSO7000 series is just a piece of junk compared to a WaveRunner in the same price range.

Then again, down in the lower end segment (WaveJet and below), LeCroy has really not much to offer to compete e.g. with an DSOX3000. And regarding signal generators the Agilent 33521A beats the crap out of that Siglent ripoff.

So it not like I can't appreciate good equipment from Agilent, but their midrange scopes surely can't compete with Lecroy DSOs and what I saw from Lecroy (TDS/DPO/MSO) was also not really impressive to say the least. Especially not at that price.

[slateraptor]

To those in industry who are in the know, how exactly do flagrant decisions like this pass muster in the first place??

[nctnico]

The mechanical construction of my Lecroy LW420A is a complete joke compared to any instrument I've ever seen from HP/Agilent or Tektronix. At one of my previous employers there was a brand new high end Lecroy DSO sitting on a shelf. Useless because it had no peak-detect. We used the HP/Agilent scopes exclusively.

For a long time now Lecroy sells mostly rebranded stuff and is cashing in on old glory. I used to own a Lecroy LA314A scope. An excellent piece of equipment... made by Iwatsu. If a piece of equipment says 'Lecroy' the same device is most likely being sold for much less under a different brand name.

[0xdeadbeef]

Well, only the low end stuff is rebranded. This is the same though for Agilent or even smaller companies as Gossen Metrawatt. All the entry level stuff is just rebranded China gear.

Honestly I never used a signal generator by LeCroy, but the scopes I saw and used were of either excellent or at least very decent quality. We have quiet a few Lecroy scopes at work which must be from the late 80s and they still work flawlessly (apart from the disk drives that usually died after all that time). This is also true for the old HP gear, but lots of the Agilent scopes which are only like 10 years old are partly unusable due to broken rotary encoders. Not that I wanted to use them anyway.

So regarding scopes, my impression is quite the opposite of yours. It seems to me that Agilent only sells scopes based on their passed (HP) glory, but feature-wise, they just can't compete with LeCroy in the higher end (10k€ and above) stuff.

[Mark]

Honestly I never used a signal generator by LeCroy, but the scopes I saw and used were of either excellent or at least very decent quality. We have quiet a few Lecroy scopes at work which must be from the late 80s and they still work flawlessly (apart from the disk drives that usually died after all that time). This is also true for the old HP gear, but lots of the Agilent scopes which are only like 10 years old are partly unusable due to broken rotary encoders. Not that I wanted to use them anyway.

So regarding scopes, my impression is quite the opposite of yours. It seems to me that Agilent only sells scopes based on their passed (HP) glory, but feature-wise, they just can't compete with LeCroy in the higher end (10k€ and above) stuff.

IMO it is quite irrelevant to compare the quality of equipment from the 80s with rebranded chinese stuff from today.  They didn't rebrand chinese stuff in the 80s, and today they do and they rely on their reputation to sell them.  The quality can be very different. 

[0xdeadbeef]

IMO it is quite irrelevant to compare the quality of equipment from the 80s with rebranded chinese stuff from today.

Nobody did. I just answered to this "LeCroy is a B-Brand and always was" comments which I considered to be wrong.

[alm]

Well, only the low end stuff is rebranded. This is the same though for Agilent or even smaller companies as Gossen Metrawatt. All the entry level stuff is just rebranded China gear.

All of the scopes sold under the Agilent brand are in-house designs, as far as I know. I believe the same is true for the 32xxx and 35xxx series of function gens. Is the DSO-X2000 series a rebranded design by some low-end Chinese manufacturer? They bought Escort, and some of their low-end DMMs are based on Escort designs, but that's not the same as rebranding.

[0xdeadbeef]

I didn't talk about scopes explicitly, yet e.g. the 1000 series is rebranded Rigol gear:
http://www.home.agilent.com/agilent/product.jspx?nid=-34250.0.00&cc=DE&lc=ger&pageMode=SC
http://mightyohm.com/blog/2009/11/agilent-dso1000-firmware-update-confirms-rigol-connection/

There's other Agilent stuff that's rebranded, there once was a thread here I think that talked about power supplies etc.

[T4P]

Well, only the low end stuff is rebranded. This is the same though for Agilent or even smaller companies as Gossen Metrawatt. All the entry level stuff is just rebranded China gear.

All of the scopes sold under the Agilent brand are in-house designs, as far as I know. I believe the same is true for the 32xxx and 35xxx series of function gens. Is the DSO-X2000 series a rebranded design by some low-end Chinese manufacturer? They bought Escort, and some of their low-end DMMs are based on Escort designs, but that's not the same as rebranding.

I tend to not believe DSOX2000 can be rebranded . It uses the same design as the X3000 so it definitely can't be .
Have you seen Dave's InfiniiVision videos ? DSOX2000 is certainly not that low end you are thinking .

[alm]

I didn't talk about scopes explicitly, yet e.g. the 1000 series is rebranded Rigol gear:

I thought the 1000 series was discontinued, my bad. That was an in my opinion not very successful attempt at rebranding by Agilent. Support and documentation was inferior to the real Agilent designs, and they advertised the Rigol name for free once people figured it out.

There's other Agilent stuff that's rebranded, there once was a thread here I think that talked about power supplies etc.

I seem to remember a thread about something like 'these power supplies look similar, are they all made by the same manufacturer?' It turned out the manufacturers were just copying each other's front panel layouts.

[Hydrawerk]

Is this ArbStudio an original LeCroy design or not?? http://teledynelecroy.com/arbstudio/arbstudio.aspx