New Keysight 4 Channel Scope (1200 X-Series)

[2N3055]

We do have a MSOX3000 at work and i do really like it since its essentially a slightly updated 6000 with a bigger screen, wavegen and slower boot time.

Tho what does irk me is that the X3000 has the same buttons on the front panel as the 6000 but they are in different locations. This often results with me hovering my finger in front of the wrong part of the front panel as i frustratingly look for the button i want to press. Oh and having a LED for AC BW 50Ohm next to the channel would be nice to have like it was on the 6000 (Seen lots of confused coworkers due to AC or BW limit being on without them knowing).

LOL that sounds familiar...
I personally miss the most physical LED for trigger event.
To the point that I connected a low power LED and resistor to trig out and sticking it out in the front.

[LapTop006]

I personally miss the most physical LED for trigger event.
To the point that I connected a low power LED and resistor to trig out and sticking it out in the front.

Oh that's really tempting. The trig out on my keysight is on the back so I'd need to do something a little more than just putting a LED in a BNC.

[Berni]

Oh nice trick.

This is one of the features that the 9000 series had that i wish was on the 6000 and X3000. The 9000 has some white LED illuminated text on the front panel that blinks "Trig'd" or lights up "Wait" when there was no trigger for a second or so.

The 9000 also has an area of the front panel dedicated to trigger where it has colored LEDs for channels 1 2 3 4 to show the trigger source, LEDs that show rising/falling/both trigger edge, LED for auto/manual trigger. And best of all each one of these LEDs has a button next to it to toggle the state of those LEDs. This makes setting up the trigger such a breeze.

But somewhat ironically the 9000 series of scopes are in all other aspects terrible for quick setup. Its a windows scope that boots slowly (Tho with an SSD it boots just as fast as a X3000), has lots more settings to tweak, slow update rate etc. I would much rather have these nice quick trigger setup buttons and LEDs on the lower end scopes where quick setup is more important.

[Hydrawerk]

And sure, the PSU caps aren't the best out there, but looking at the numbers the reliability of the 2-channel 1000X is insanely good. I obviously can't share numbers, but the AFR/MTBF is easily 2x better than a lot of our other gear.

The PSU actually looks nice. https://youtu.be/9KcOQsVxtoU?t=475

[Bud]

@Bud, that is really odd! How often does it happen?

I have not used the scope much yet, maybe 20 times , out of which the power switch failed two times. It feels like the pushswitch latching mechanism failing.

[Hydrawerk]

Is there going to be a successor for DSOX2000 and DSOX3000 from 2011?

[Berni]

I dunno the X3000 still feels like very modern scope, it even has a touchscreen. All the other low cost scopes ware just playing catch-up to it for a good few years when it was released. Now that they have caught up Keysights low end scope lineup is on par with everyone else.

But even when the successor to the X3000 launches i wouldn't expect there to be that much new. I still use a old MSO6000 that is pretty much the predecessor to the X3000 series. The two scopes are very similar in operation, UI and performance. What you get with the X3000 is higher waveform update rate, waveform generator, touchscreen, some modernization, but at the same time the 6000 has 4 times as much waveform memory, 1/5 the boot time, all interfaces available without a add-on module (USB Ethernet GPIB), higher resolution screen etc...

The now discontinued MSO6000 series is so old that the predecessor to that still had a CRT screen and carried a Hewlett Packard logo. So id say we have at least 5 years or not more before Keysight would consider updating it.

Scopes don't age anywhere near as quick as consumer electronics like TVs

[nctnico]

Well the memory depth on the Keysight scopes is extremely poor. Even compared to their A-brand competitors.

[Berni]

Well the memory depth on the Keysight scopes is extremely poor. Even compared to their A-brand competitors.

Yeah true in numbers the gap is pretty big. But in practice going from 10K to 1M is a massive difference, but going from 1M to 100M is not. For the ocasonal cases where deep memory is useful one can usually get around it with segmented memory modes.

They are one of the rare vendors that keep sample memory inside the ASIC  This limits the size of memory but gives it a huge speed advantage. Other scopes slow down when large memory is selected. The Keysight scopes don't even have a option to select less than max memory because the scope keeps running at top speed even when using all of it. This sort of consistent quick speed of both the acquisition and UI is a major selling point of these scopes that is not visible on the spec sheet. I personally really enjoy that it feels like using a analog scope with how instant everything is.

All depends on what you want from a scope.

[nimish]

Hmm...$2000 for a scope that's using decade old tech, when I could get a RTB2002/4 with 10bit and also from a top tier test equipment maker

Or 1/2 that to roll the dice on a rigol DSO5000

...Who is the target market for this?

When is keysight going to invest in a new ASIC or one that can support deep memory?

[JPortici]

As other said deep memory is nice but IMHO overrated. The RTB slows down a bit at 1Mpts
In a new asic i'd rather like to have less input noise and/or more resolution and/or increased VIDEO resolution to support a bigger display

That said, the 3000X is STILL an insanely good scope.
The amount of options and protocol decoders will be found only in scopes from the copetition that have another zero on the pricetag.
The update with the touch screen and zoom trigger and everything was very nice, it was done by someone young enough to understand that a touch screen is not a replacement for a single button mouse
The ARB generator that while it may not satisfy every user's needs it is perfectly integrated with the scope, another case where the user interface was took seriously and done right.

[Berni]

Yes i also think they should up the screen resolution, im used to the  1024x768 of my MSO6000 and yet the X2000/X3000 despite having a much larger screen have less resolution.

The noise and resolution is really just ADC/AFE dependent so the price point of the scope puts some limitations on those.

What i would want instead are some of the Infiniium series features carried over to the low end scopes. Specifically i would want the FFT and High resolution modes. The FFT on those scopes is run like a spectrum analyzer where you just punch in the center,span,rbw freqency and the scope sets up the optimal acquisition settings to get that. Then the high resolution mode essentially makes the scope a lower bandwidth model using downsampling. In the case of the 9000 series this lets you turn a 20GS/s 4GHz 8bit scope into a 500MHz 12bit scope (or anything in between as you can select 9bit 10bit 11bit 12bit). This downsampling is done in hardware before the sample memory so it lets you capture for longer and doesn't cause any of the weird high res behavior that the X3000 scopes do (Where high res is done after it was captured and shifts about as you change the timebase). Sure its not a real 12bit scope but it really does bring the noise into 12bit territory with the flick of a button without any adverse side effects apart from less samplerate/bandwith. When you need your full bandwidth back just turn it back off.

That particular feature was mostly born out of Agilents kneejerk reaction to Lecroys 12bit scopes, but its genuinely a great feature that seamed to have been forgotten now that Keysight developed real 10bit ADCs for scopes.

[Mr Nutts]

Other scopes slow down when large memory is selected. The Keysight scopes don't even have a option to select less than max memory because the scope keeps running at top speed even when using all of it.

Does it really? As far as I know these Megazoom scopes use only a small part of the overall sample memory in a kind of bank switching mode where the scope switches between two small memory blocks (each of a size for enough data to fill the screen) and alternates between them, i.e. while one block is used for sampling the other block gets converted into display data. The only time it uses all available memory is when stop is pressed or when something like zoom is selected.
 
At least that’s what my Infinum DSO8064A seems to be doing, which also has Megazoom but much more memory (128M)

[Berni]

The ping-pong memory is used in most scopes out there, not only Keysight ones. Its just classical double buffering so that the scope can be capturing into one buffer while simultaneously drawing the other buffer to the screen.

The Keysight Infinnium scopes do have memory depth selection because they slow down a lot past 1Mpts due to the internal PC being involved in drawing the waveform rather than the ASIC doing all of it. For my particular MSO9000 scope they try to hide this double buffering by allowing the same max capture size for both run and single shot. Its only if you select the 1Gpts setting, then the scope will display a warning that the scope is now limited to single shot mode and that you need to go to 512Mpts for run mode to be available. If you don't have the option license for 1Gpts then you will never see that warning. So if you have a license for 256Mpts it will be 256 both in run or single short mode, but it still drops to 128 when you use more than 2 channels (Again typical scope behavior)

Tho so far i have never used that 1Gpts memory depth for anything useful. The scope is still reasonably responsive viewing a waveform at that depth, but the moment you start adding measurements or math channels to it the thing grinds to a halt, literally taking it over a minute in some cases to process the waveform and show results. But it is pretty cool that it can capture 1 full second of continuous trace at 1GS/s

The MSO8000 series still runs the old Infiniium software as far as i know, so it could be different. Still worth picking up a decent old Infiniium tho as a secondary scope, some can be had pretty cheap.

EDIT: But i do not recommend using a Agilent PC based scope as your main scope, they are kinda clumsy for doing quick poking around a board.

[Mr Nutts]

My DSO8064A doesn’t seem to slow down with more than 1M. It gets slow if I select the full 128M but that’s to be expected
 
The Infinum 8000 runs the old XP software but its architecture is different from the 548xx scopes as it doesn’t use two graphic cards with hardware overlay. Apparently the Infinum 8000 is much closer to the 9000 than to the previous scopes.
 
My day to day scope is a Lecroy LT574M but more and more often I use the DSO8064A. If only the tocuhs creen wasn’t that small, without a mouse it’s really hard to use, especially with big hands 
 
 

[nctnico]

Well the memory depth on the Keysight scopes is extremely poor. Even compared to their A-brand competitors.

Yeah true in numbers the gap is pretty big. But in practice going from 10K to 1M is a massive difference, but going from 1M to 100M is not. For the ocasonal cases where deep memory is useful one can usually get around it with segmented memory modes.

They are one of the rare vendors that keep sample memory inside the ASIC  This limits the size of memory but gives it a huge speed
All depends on what you want from a scope.

The latter is true. For me the lack of deep memory is a deal breaker especially since the actual operational memory on the Keysight scopes is much less than it says on the badge. Sure you can make do with segments but even then you'll need a certain amount of oversampling for decode to keep working. On a scope with deep memory you can choose to use a short acquisition memory setting if you want a high update rate. On the lower end Keysight scopes there is no option to get lots of memory if you need it.

[Berni]

Well i don't know about the speeds of the Agilent MSO8000 series, but the MSO9000 is a lot faster running at Kilosamples of memory compared to Megasamples. What i consider fast on a 9000 is having a handful of acquisitions per LCD refresh period. In Megasample capture length that turns around to a hanful of LCD refresh periods per acquisition. And i still consider all of that slow when im used to the consistent lightning speed of a MSO6000.

So far i haven't seen the perfect scope that hits all the upsides in one scope, just like i have yet to find the perfect handheld multimeter. So for my needs i use a combination of a MSO6000 (Super fast, reasonable performance, great for day to day tasks and poking around) and MSO9000 (Much higher performance and broader feature set, used for the more serious measurements)

The speed of Keysight scopes you only really appreciate when you used one for a while and then go to a different scope. Much like 30fps video looks just fine until you watch 60fps video for a while and get used to it and then watch something 30 fps again. Im not saying other scopes are slow, just that they are not quite as quick as Keysights (Its the subtle differences mesured in 10s of miliseconds). I'm not a Keysight fanboy or anythyng, its just that i happened to end up with two scopes and got used to it. Scopes are expensive so i can't exactly keep 5 of them around from different vendors.

[Mr Nutts]

Maybe kb memory feels faster on the Infinum 9000  probably because it samples with 10(?) Gsps while Infinum 8000 samples with 4 Gsps?   
 
My Infinum 8000 feels fast which is nice. If only the touchscreen was a bit bigger
 
My Lecroy LT374M a low waveform rate but it has great triggers which I find more important. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter if a scope is blind 98% of the time or “just” 82% because it will still be blind for most of the time. Good triggers find problems at their first occurrence

[KC0PPH]

Can you Hack the 1204G to 200Mhz and Full Options?

[Hydrawerk]

Are there some Easter Eggs on Keysight DSOX1000 series scopes? Like the easter eggs on DSOX2000 (Trek screensaver, Etch-a-scope, jumping letters)

[TK]

Are there some Easter Eggs on Keysight DSOX1000 series scopes? Like the easter eggs on DSOX2000 (Trek screensaver, Etch-a-scope, jumping letters)

Yes, the LOST Easter Egg on the 2+1 channel scopes: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/time-travelling-on-my-keysight-edux1002g/msg1280254/#msg1280254

[Hydrawerk]

Keysight DSOX1000

My mate at work has this scope. There are jumping letters and TREK easter eggs. I could not find the Etch-a-scope Easter Egg.

[extide]

Does anyone know what the default password is to Login to the Scope's web interface over LAN ?

[kerpal]

A LAN Reset should put it at "no password" mode, no?

[martinot]

From the pictures it is a GWInstek OEM ... hence also of chinese origin.
Calvin

Old thread, but I can not see how you fail to see the difference between a KS scope (professional design) and GW (toy like design, even if good scopes)?

Are you blind man?