Colin,
there are only 19 divs, you miscounted it. We have also 760x400 effective points on the display.
Why ? Probably easier to divide. Of course it could be fixed view area with a bit larger display,
like on Agilent DSOX but on the other side the F0 Menu On/Off marking is big enough to see it
To understand why Tekway chose 800x480 display (or why some things are like this and not different) we have to look back.
They new on the market, so probably they started DSO development from business point of view:
- take µC/DSP platform which is wide available and cheap
(Samsung SoC instead of TI DSP - to be different/better and cheaper than competitors)
- create something "known" but at lower price
(like Tektronix clone)
- chose nice company name assiociated with something ppl know.
(like Tek-way ...)
So
Tekway was born, and of course the first product was Tektronix clone. They even made some advertisement
like "our Tektronix clone - but cheaper". I do have such Tekway DST1102 too, you can blind navigate through
menu if you know Tektronix TDS2012 - but of course exact the same disadvantages - slow display update rate,
crap display and 2500 points memory. You can still buy some of these DSOs - designed for chinese market (only chinese fw).
However Tekway realized that ppl don't need another one Tektronix clone - to have a chance on DSO market you have
to develop something better than (chinese) competitors. So the actuall series was born.
To not start from scratch they decided to continue work and improve their DST1000 platfrom.
So instead of Samsung S3C2410 (266MHz) like on DST1000 then chose S3C2440 (400Mhz), added external SRAM and CPLD,
faster and bigger FPGA and bigger display. If you look on the Samsung SoC dev. board market you wil find out
the common biggest display at that time was Innolux AT070TN83 - they wide available, good quality and cheap displays.
All these steps are typical for someone who just started on DSO market, they will need some time (or well, with the Hantek
merger they actually got a "good" name, or at least known name) to be real DSO developers/manufacturers.
However, if i do compare to comeptitors they already better than all of them together (uni-t, atten, rigol) - at least on the paper.
Sure, these firmware bugs are not nice - but the platform is good, so it is easier to fix firmware bugs instead of "fix the platform".
I know that earilier firmwares were working much better, sure with some small bugs around F7 button but everything else was ok.
The "disaster" started as they decided to implement more features, more languages, more menu options and tried to
fix alread known small bugs ... i do undertood why they did it:
- missing features vs. chinese competitors products
- Hantek ruled multilanguage product policy
but honestly don't know why they decided to use not stable firmware version for end user products.
Anyway, maybe they learned from Microsoft ("field evaluation" engineering) and as you said
"designed by a programmer used to binary and software, not by a scope engineer" - so if you don't knwo what
ppl really need develop "something you think it might work" , let end user test it and decide later based on feedback.
If you look on competitors - e.g. UNI-T - they realized very fast "we need bigger display", but instead of display with
biger resolution they chosed bigger display with small resolution, removing all informations from website ... as ppl realized
they got cheatted uni-t promissed to fix the firmware. One year later and after 4 firmware updates no changes on the
display - and probably they will never fix it - the platform is not good enough for better resultion.
Rigol/Atten - they have to start from scratch too - the DSP/display controller platform is not good enough to
handle bigger resolutions, Rigol decided (at least until now) to not cheat customers and is still producing DSOs with 320x240
and "small" display, ATTEN/Siglent did same as UNI-T - big display with small resolution (yhear, the typical buyer will not even recognize it).
The worse part of the story is that many ebay/china shops are selling these Atten/Siglent/UNI-T DSOs under
"big resolution 800x480 DSO" - which isn't truth. As we can see "fix the platform" is not easy step.
Back to "topic" - of course is Tekway/Hantek not a real DSO manufacturer, they doing great job and let's hope they will
fix firmware issues. I know them and i know they doing everything necessary to fix it - however i can't vouch for.
I don't know why all chinese manufacturers hiding details of their products, there is nothing to shame about.
If a product does not have something implemented, well who cares, the truth is better than "cheatting".
Probably they learned from the wester-world competitors - if you need to know something "bad" about
Tektronix - don't ask them, ask Agilent - and vice versa of course. I remember these nice LeCroy
presentations - "refresh rate didn't matter, do single shot and you can find the spike with our software".
Sure, i would probably said the same if my product is slow refreshing. Of course the actuall HanTekway 2500 wrfm/s
are not much, but better than 800. It was not all that long ago that Tektronix prodeuced DPOs with similar refresh rate,
even current low range models are not much better at all. Or look on Hameg - no single word about refresh rate,
but copmetitors know it of course, and yeah it is on Tekway/Hantek level. If you look on my first post in this thread you
will see i was looking for "replacement" for my broken TDS754D. To be very i bough the older Tekway model and was
disapointed (currently using it as DIY Spectrum Analyzer), then bought Tektronix DST2012 - again very
disapointed (luckily i bough it very cheap, with broken front and display). Then i started again to look around chinese product,
tested some and finaly decided to use Tekway. It can't repalce my old TDS754D, but is a good enough.
Today i would probably buy 70Mhz Agilent DSOX2000 (and hack it to higher bw) or Tekway - even with these firmware bugs -
because of the potential within this hardware/software platform.
It is all about the price vs. features. On the other side there is no warranty that high end scope will have perfect firmware,
actually you can buy one of the R&S scopes and you will see how perfectly they freezing every two days, there
are other DSOs with known issues too, nobody is perfect.
So what, good value for money ? Sure, and it does have potential, but jesus, some of the firmware issues need to fixed asap.