Hi,
New member here. I'm considering getting a Rigol DS2074 after basically dimissing the Owon XDS series having seen the 14 bit teardown as I don't want a scope that's likely to break down in a few years due to bad soldering, bad caps or whatever. The Rigol stuff appears to have much better internal design and build quality but then I found this video on its mediocre FFT performance.
However, I'm wondering wich firmware was used in that video for the Rigols because I came accross this:
With the latest firmware (00.04.03 SP2) for the Rigol MSO/DS1000Z Series Oscilloscopes the FFT functionality has been improved.
The FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) now can be calculated not only from the screen points but also on 16k points from the acquisition memory. This new enhancement enables the customer to perform FFT analyis in the frequency domain with increased frequency resolution.
Calculating FFT only from the screen points? What were they thinking? Anyway, cccording to the page info for that URL this appears to have been released in July 2015 and the 2000 series was released before that so I
guess this enhancement was included in the 2000 series from the start but I don't like to guess or make assumptions.
So, is the FFT performance of the 2000 series still as mediocre with the latest firmware? Not sure if it's going to be a deal-breaker for me, I won't need FFT a lot and I suppose I could export the data and have it analyzed on my PC or something, right?
The 2074 seems rather attractive and it's currently on sale at Batronix for € 802.18 incl. VAT (and I don't have to pay VAT as a company) but
are there any other scopes I should be looking at for that price or lower? I should say that the 2074 already offers much more than I would actually need, I could probably get by with a €300 scope but I just love the larger 800x480 display, graded display and better update rates and if I understand it can also function as a Wave Generator and replay back captured waveforms which for my application would be very convenient.
Thanks,
Arjan