@awakephd So, I promised to give you a description of my experience with the Rigol DHO800 once I received it. It's been amusing to watch the Rigol and Siglent factions battle it out here, but I come from a position of total neutrality. I've had it for about a week now and I'm really enjoying it. The last time I'd regularly used a CRO was a 2-tonne Tektronix at university in the 80's. Since then, I've only worked with voltages of 132 kV and above. I've recently set up a modest home lab and I'll mostly be using it for switch mode power supply design and some audio amplifier work (I've already managed to repair two old hi-fi amps for friends). I also wanted a scope that I could easily run off a battery to float. I have a small sealed AGM deep-cycle lead acid battery that will give me around 3 hours of runtime, so with wi-fi remote control, (which works quite well), it will let me safely do a couple of odd things that I have in mind. That was one of the deciding factors that tipped me toward the Rigol, plus the unavailability of the Siglent 800X in Australia when I placed my order.
I know this is something that all modern DSOs would do, but I didn't realise just how useful the measuring functions would be. This week I've been tuning the gate drivers for an SMPS project I'm working on and it has made life so much easier. Having Vmax, rise & fall times, duty cycle, overshoot %, etc, listed to the side of the screen is fantastic. My only gripes so far are some relatively minor things with the screen design. I did a little mock-up that I'll attach below. I'm sure that Rigol will see it and address all my points in the next firmware update.
1. Why do they waste the vertical space of such a small screen with all those grey borders (that I've highlighted in RED), I don't know? I guess it's from carrying the design over from their larger screen models. Anyway, it's not an issue in practice, but sure, it would be nice for the waveform window to have a little extra height.
2. I've edited the image to add the probe ratios. Why on earth haven't they put them there? Instead, the space is used to show the text "20 MHz" when you enable Bandwidth Limiting. I don't know how often people use that, but since it's an ON/OFF thing, it could easily be indicated by a symbol next to the channel number to make room for the probe ratios to be shown.
3. The 'Results' list on the right of the screen could show 8 results instead of 5 if they didn't waste all that vertical space. They could still keep the little graphic by moving it to the right of the text. It's nice that it lets you have items from different channels at the same time, so you could easily make good use of 8 quantities instead of 5. (Does the Siglent allow measurements from multiple channels at the same time? Defpoms review seemed to suggest not, I could be wrong, although it seems to allow you to display more items at once.)
4. I might like the waveform window to contract when the 'Result' list is displayed on the right since I have that displaying pretty much all the time, then again it is transparent and you can see through it. (I believe there is an option to toggle that on and off on the SDS800X).
5. I'm not sold on the idea of 'maths' traces being displayed in individual separate windows. It hasn't been a problem for me yet, but I'm guessing a scenario will come up soon where I'd like to overlay a 'maths' trace on the regular waveform traces, although you can stack the windows vertically with aligned time scales, so that's something at least.
Anyway, that's it. If I got to choose one item on the list to be implemented, it would be number 3, followed by number 5. My needs are pretty basic. I'm doing simple circuit design and just want to see what is happening. There are probably all sorts of nuanced differences in complex functionality between the SDS800X and DHO800 that I have no idea about. I'll need to do some bode plots soon, which I won't be able to automate, but having the ability to display calculated waveform peaks and phase differences between channel traces will make that a piece of cake anyway. The FFT looks good to me, at least at the frequencies I'm interested in. It seems fast enough and the accompanying table you can turn on is nice.
If the Siglent had been available, I might have got it instead. It seems to have been designed to make slightly better use of the screen real estate, whereas the Rigol looks designed to give 'wow' factor at first glance....engineers vs marketers and graphic designers, but I'm sure either would do the job for me just fine...we are really are spoiled for choice and value.