Got mine today, a DS1074Z-S. It looks the part. Four channels and deep capture memory is a base model for me, I've skipped looking at anything less.
It feels sturdy. Nice display. Lots of settings ... not always staying as set though. Menus are responsive. The separate group of keys on the left for selecting measurements seemed extraneous at first but I think I might like them now. Noise levels look good. All in all an excellent purchase.
Here's some niggles that could be sorted with firmware updates:
- The transition from full sweep redraws to the progressive drawing, or trending, that occurs at slow timebases. It kicks in at too slow a setting, imho. The refresh times feel unresponsive when waiting for a full sweep redraw.
- There is a second concern, and more annoying, with the trending method - It only trends post trigger! If the trigger is in centre of display then you end up waiting a half display of sweep time before any activity occurs. This can be minutes! This, combined with the time based (rather than display based) trigger position, kind of makes for a lot of fiddling to get immediate visualisation of acquisitions.
Updates:
27 Oct 2013
Trivial gripe: CLEAR, AUTO and SINGLE keys really do seem to be useless. Why would one want to clear all traces? I've used auto setting before, it never gets what I want and it totally loses the settings I had set. A separate button to set single trigger mode, say what?, there is a simple to use trigger mode button straight below that!
And on the small gripes list is the HELP pages. There is some broken descriptions in there, eg: Memory depth in the acquisition menu, it repeats a single channel description three times over and doesn't describe any multi-channel info.
Not so trivial: In the acquisition menu, what does Sin(x)/x setting do? I don't see any effect on traces. The help makes a vague reference to interleaving. This setting is one of those settings, I mentioned previously, that doesn't stay set. Maybe it doesn't really need a user setting at all?
Actually, the Help system has been helpful. I've definitely seen much worse. Some kudos are deserved there.
When Zoom'd it would be nice to know the number of sample points covered by the zoom box.
... Just noticed another one to be wary of: Peak acquisition mode places it's two min-max values in successive sample points in the trace. This allows the memory depth to be shown as unchanging between Normal and Peak modes. I had wondered why that parameter didn't change. The problem with this configuration is when zooming in to look at the fine detail, instead of seeing a continuous min-max block fill, you see a triangle wave at half the sample rate toggling between the upper and lower values. A sudo alias of sorts. This is a behaviour that Peak mode is meant to avoid.
Once you are aware of this though, it could be used. The question becomes: Does the min and max alternately stored samples represent a progression in time? If so, then there is extra info in them than just being a collective min-max of the whole interval.
... Just delivered the scope to a new temporary home (I might not be very detailed from now.) ... has a use for the waveform generator ... bugs galore! :-O First bug is either the outputs are not meant to be active on power up or the lamp in the Source button does not light to indicate an output is active on power up. It syncs up when toggling either of the output on/off settings.
Second waveform generator bug is when changing pretty much any setting with modulation enabled causes it to set the depth to 100% and uses the depth setting to set the RMS level. All without indication. Turning modulation off then on corrects it.
Third waveform generator bug is when selecting waveform type Pulse the modulation is not immediately disabled as it seems to require.
Evan