Hi all,
When I was learning electronics, having a scope at all was a luxury. They were expensive, and only really available if you had access to a professional lab. We had a couple of crappy ones at school, and my dad occasionally brought home a 20 MHz Hameg from work, but that was about it.
Not long after I graduated I ended up working for a major electronics company, where we had some properly decent Tektronix kit in the lab. We had a TDS3014 as the general 'every day' scope, and there was a 500 MHz TDS5xx in the lab which we used on memory interfaces and other fast stuff.
Both were great - easy to use, clear displays, flexible trigger options, and the whole 'digital phosphor' display mode gave a superb impression of the shape of the signal. (Yes, I'm a Tek fan, and no, I'm not going to apologise! I seem to remember we tried a LeCroy before buying the TDS, and we all hated it).
Last year I started doing some consulting work, and had to set myself up a proper lab. I needed a DSO for capturing one-off events, so out went my 100 MHz analogue Fluke scope (a nice enough piece of kit), and in came a Tek TDS754D. I like my Tek a lot; it's the updated, colour version of the "good" lab scope we had back in the day, and thanks to the passage of time and the arrival of Ebay, reasonably affordable. But I'm aware that it's on borrowed time; the date in the firmware says 1991-98, so it's 14 years old, and they're a total swine to fix when they do break.
Having used new, cheaper scopes, I'm still glad I bought the Tek, though. One place I work has a 150Mhz Iso-Tech, which is a ghastly device - very basic, smeary display with a dreadful viewing angle, no memory depth, poor resolution, and generally horrible to use. A cheap Owon I saw last year looked even worse.
So, my question is: are the 'budget' brands getting any better? Can I reasonably expect to buy a modern, relatively inexpensive scope that genuinely compares to my 14 yr old Tek in terms of quality, ease of use, bandwidth and other capabilities?
On the face of it, I ought to be able to. Nobody would ever claim that a 14 year old PC was a better bet than a modern one, however expensive it may have been in its day But apart from my laptop, most of my lab equipment is of a similar vintage, and I can't say I feel like I'm missing out. Any modern 4 channel 500 MHz scope is still well into four figures, but a Rigol DS4054 is less than half the price of a Tek TDS3054C. Are they seriously comparable, or would I just find myself sending it straight back and looking to Ebay for another used bargain?