HDO6000

[branadic]

Hi guys,

anyone out there who tested a DSO of the LeCroy HD6000 series ,yet?
I`m happy to have a HDO6054 test device til monday and I can tell you, it`s an amazing powerful device. Real 12bit vertical resolution, with weighted oversampling methodes up to 3bits more. Incredible math and measurement functions, many optical goodies.
Up to now I thought my TDS5104B is a good one, but this guy is awesome. Nearly the full adc range is visible on the screen, while at the Tek only 200incr. per 8divs are shown on the screen and the other 2 divisions (56incr.) are hidden. Thanks to the var. gain input stage, which is more precise adjustable compared to the Tek, signals can be extended to the full adc scale.

The signals are crystal clear as they promote on their website, tested a few signals from my function generators.

With the 250Mpt. memory I`m able to sample 10ms/div with the full sample rate of 2.5GSps, which results in nearly 7GB files per channel (time + amplitude). After the Embedded World I will test a device of the Agilent 9000 series, but I fear I will be disappointed, because it`s one of these 8bit scopes with 16x oversampling to get this 12bits.
Contrary to Agilent all options need hardware modifications, they are not installed and activated by a code, I like that.
The big 250Mpt./Ch memory is about 8805€ at LeCroy, Agilent wants incredible 20k€ for the same memory size. Wtf?

The device I have right now is about 25605€, that`s a new care, but it`s worth every single €. This sucker is for sure the connection of analog and digital scope in one device.

branadic

[Smokey]

Only 25605€ (34,254USD)??  I'll take two!!!

Seriously though, that sounds like a beast!  It looks cool too, all black.
http://teledynelecroy.com/oscilloscope/oscilloscopemodel.aspx?modelid=7169

I found this comparison to the Agilent9000 from the Agilent point of view.  It's always interesting to see how each company pushes the features they have the advantage in as the most important.  I love the one lonely missing "History mode playback" feature in the Agilent column.
http://cp.literature.agilent.com/litweb/pdf/5991-1663EN.pdf

There should be a "New Toys At Work" sub-forum in the test-equipment section.

[Hydrawerk]

Did you measure the waveform capture rate of HDO6000?

[branadic]

Only 25605€ (34,254USD)??  I'll take two!!!

Seriously though, that sounds like a beast!  It looks cool too, all black.
http://teledynelecroy.com/oscilloscope/oscilloscopemodel.aspx?modelid=7169

I found this comparison to the Agilent9000 from the Agilent point of view.  It's always interesting to see how each company pushes the features they have the advantage in as the most important.  I love the one lonely missing "History mode playback" feature in the Agilent column.
http://cp.literature.agilent.com/litweb/pdf/5991-1663EN.pdf

There should be a "New Toys At Work" sub-forum in the test-equipment section.

Yes, very interesting review and optimistic in many points:

8bit, up to 12bit at Agilent 9000H-Series / 12bit, up to 15bit at HDO4000 and 6000 --> red cross for Agilent

SSD available as option at Agilent / standard at Le Croy --> red cross for Agilent

The update rate at this specific setting is some kind of eyewash, I thought I found that the HDO6000 has an update rate of up to 1.25 million wfm/s.

Did you measure the waveform capture rate of HDO6000?

No, it is of less interest for me, because my field of action is not signal integrity measurement, but analog and mixed signal ciruit developement. What I need is big memory, high resolution of my signals and powerful math.

[free_electron]

15 bit for the lecrap ? Imterpolated you mean...  That thing only has a 12 bit convertor just like the agilent.

The agilent is a clear winner. For several reasons.
-Faster sampling
-Higher bandwidth
-More memory
-Larger display ( a machine in this category needs that. It's high resolution, but the display is so small you can't see it. ... Duh! Anyone know what the display res is ? Where's the scopes with retina displays. . Come on , a 500$ tablet has a more-than-hd display and 20k$ scopes are still stuck in 800x600 land?
-Faster refresh rate
-Mixed signal ! All modern systems are mixed signal. I want to keep my 4 analog signals to poke around and use the digitals for trigger. Typical example : measure the settling time of a programmable voltage regulator chip. The chip uses i2c or spi as interface. You hook up the digital inputs , flick on the packet decoder tell the scope to look for a packet that modifies the voltage dac and trigger on the acknowledge of that packet . I can now directly see  when the voltage change command begins executing and look at what the regulator does and how long it takes.
-precision current probes. I played with the new agilent current probe. It is fenomenal. Lecroy is still stuck with the rebadged hioki kludges that need to clamp around cables ( good luck sensing the current consumption of a chip... You need to cut traces on the board and solder a bodge wire..) and it still cannot show you a high dynamic range signal. For example the current drawn by the pa in a cell phone.. It goes from microamps to amps and back. The agilent probe has no problem with that at all.
The scope is 1 thing... Probes is another... Lecroy is lacking on those.

Now, in all fairness, i must say that it looks like there is a new wind blowing at lecroy since they were bought by teledyne. I was at Devcon a couple of weeks ago and talking to the agilent guys. One guy from lecroy was hanging around and i jokingly 'hissed'at him. We started talking and i let loose about all my frustrations i have had with lecroy scopes over the years ( i have multiple (sda, 7000 series, 7200 series, dda, wavesurfer, wavemaster, 7zi ) lecroy machines that span 9 years, and they all have given me grief and trouble) .

A day after devcon i got an email from that chap. He was the product director and wanted me to write down all the misery i have had over the years. Because 'this should not be'...

It was a long email with a 12 page attachment of screenshots where the lecroys mess up. From cursors dissapearing, showing the wrong data in the zoom trace ( you highlight an area on the main trace and the xoom trace shows you data from somewhere else ), machines bluescreening if you turn the timebase knob too fast, machines freezing in roll mode, endless 'calibrating' cycles...

He seemed genuinely interested in the problems we encountered. We'll see.

[T4P]

And now a 600$ 5" phone has Full HD resolution  (HTC Butterfly)

[alm]

-precision current probes. I played with the new agilent current probe. It is fenomenal. Lecroy is still stuck with the rebadged hioki kludges that need to clamp around cables ( good luck sensing the current consumption of a chip... You need to cut traces on the board and solder a bodge wire..) and it still cannot show you a high dynamic range signal.

I believe the new Agilent high-sensitivity current probe include a sense resistor and a differential amplifier. How is inserting a sense resistor in the circuit less invasive than a loop of wire? Both will require cutting traces or modifying the PCB design, and both will introduce extra impedance in the circuit that may change its operation.

If you want bandwidth beyond a few MHz, then Agilent is also happy to sell you some Hioki probes. Last time I checked there were three manufacturers of wide-bandwidth AC-DC current probes, and Agilent wasn't one of them. They were Tektronix (who own the original now expired patent), Hioki and a third manufacturer (LEM?).

[branadic]

15 bit for the lecrap ? Imterpolated you mean...  That thing only has a 12 bit convertor just like the agilent.

Do you really believe in this words?
The Agilent is just an 8bit scope with 16 times oversampling to get the 12bit (just take a look in the datasheet, they don't hide this fact but they don't  solicit it directly), while the LeCroy has a real 12bit ADC and with oversampling technics up to 15bit are available.

As far as I remember LeCroy is the one with the longer experience in DSOs, compared to Agilent. Agilent was once HP also known as "High Prices" and since they become Agilent they produced nothing really revolutionary. Can you show me an example for the opposite?

My opinion is that Agilent lags LeCroy and not reverse. Agilent can do everthing but nothing right.

By the way: LeCroy wasn't bought, they consolidated with Teledyne, that's a small big difference.

HDP6000:

DC Gain Accuracy (Gain Component of DC Accuracy): ±(0.5%) F.S, offset at 0 V

DC Vertical Offset Accuracy ±(1.0% of offset value + 0.5%FS + 0.02% of max offset + 1mV)

Agilent 9000:

DC gain accuracy (2,3): ±2% of full scale at full resolution on channel scale ±5 °C from cal temp
(typically < 1% at cal temp)

2. Vertical resolution for 12 bits = 0.024% of full scale.
3. 50? input: Full scale is defined as 8 vertical divisions. Magnification is used below 10mV/div. The major scale settings are 5 mV, 10 mV, 20 mV, 50 mV, 100 mV, 200 mV, 500 mV, 1 V.
1M? input: Full scale is defined as 8 vertical divisions. Magnification is used below 5mV/div, full-scale is defined as 40 mV. The major scale settings are 5 mV, 10 mV, 20 mV,
50 mV, 100 mV, 200 mV, 500 mV, 1 V,2 V, 5 V

Offset accuracy (3): ±(1.25% of channel offset + 1% of full scale + 1 mV)

3. 50? input: Full scale is defined as 8 vertical divisions. The major scale settings are 5mV, 10mV, 20mV, 50 mV, 100 mV, 200 mV, 500 mV, 1V.
1M? input: Full scale is defined as 8 vertical divisions. The major scale settings are 5mV, 10mV, 20mV, 50 mV, 100 mV, 200 mV, 5 00mV, 1V, 2V, 5V.

[T4P]

You come across more of a lecroy fanboy than anything else
Agilent is doing everything right and lecrap is doing everything wrong now.

[branadic]

You come across more of a lecroy fanboy than anything else
Agilent is doing everything right and lecrap is doing everything wrong now.

Such a statement and defamation shows me that you have no idea of the matter, the company name is LeCroy! I presented facts, no sympathy. The gain accuracy shows, that Agilents "up to 12bit DSO" has nothing to do with a real 12bit one. But if you prefer estimated than real measured values, no problem.
Seems like some of you guys here are fanboys of Agilents stuff, because they support this board with test devices?
Maybe Dave can review the HDO6054 and compare it to the DSO9054H, than we can face the facts of two scopes of the same class, 4-channel, 500MHz, 2.5GS.

As I already said, I'll have the DSO9054H soon, but I was shown the MSO7000 series last year and it wasn't much stronger compared to my TDS5104B. I can do without logic analyzer functionallity implemented to a DSO and beyond that with integrated function generators, I prefer professional bench equipement for that.

[Marco]

How many ADC bits make sense BTW? They spec the input amplifier at 55 dB SNR ... so that's already 2 bits buried in noise ignoring the probe (presumably only at 1 GHz, with more effective bits available when you turn on the bandwidth limiters). How many bits remain when including a probe with reasonable impedance? (Active or high impedance attenuator with coax.)

[branadic]

I think the 55dB SNR are representative for the smallest vertical resolution (maximum gain) and the maximum bandwidth they specify on this series (1GHz). For the higher FS ranges and lower bandwidths this value will increase.
If you for example take a look in the datasheet of the LMH6518 you find a given SNR of 44dB for the range 8m-24mV FS but 53.4dB for 80m-80V FS with a 200MHz filter and can maybe follow my argument.

[Wuerstchenhund]

As far as I remember LeCroy is the one with the longer experience in DSOs, compared to Agilent. Agilent was once HP also known as "High Prices" and since they become Agilent they produced nothing really revolutionary. Can you show me an example for the opposite?

My opinion is that Agilent lags LeCroy and not reverse. Agilent can do everthing but nothing right.

I think you are getting a bit into fanboi territory here. HP T&M had a very long history in making digital scopes before they became Agilent. As for Agilent not producing anything revolutionary, this can be said about most manufacturers as especially in test equipment product development is generally more evolutionary than revolutionary. And yes, Agilent does everything but saying they do nothing right is just plain silly and ignores the reality which is that Agilent now (especially after Tek's now less than exciting product offerings in many areas) simply is the gold standard in many labs and industries where you rarely see anything made by LeCroy.

And quite frankly, I think it's fair to say that LeCroy doesn't do everything right, too. They messed up big time with their low end scopes (WaveAce) and signal generators (WaveStation) which at the end of the day is just relabelled China crap with bug-ridden firmware, while Agilent in this segment offers much better and more mature products.

At the end of the day, both companies have products that are great and some that aren't or that aren't great for every task. That's why one should choose test equipment on how good it performs in the required role and not by the manufacturer label on the front panel.

By the way: LeCroy wasn't bought, they consolidated with Teledyne, that's a small big difference.

No, they didn't. LeCroy was bought by Teledyne, plain and simple. The "LeCroy" name was kept simply because it's an established name in the industry. It's the same Danaher did with Tektronix, with the only difference that Tek got a shedload of MBAs and micromanagement while LeCroy apparently kept a lot of their freedoms inside Teledyne.

[branadic]

This is for sure a fanboy territory here, because some guys here love the chineese low cost DSOs  so much and never had a real scope at hand so that they think this is state of the art. We are talking about professional equipment and this market is very clear (Tektronix, LeCroy, Agilent, R&S)

For me Agilent and HP are two different pairs of shoes, HP produced nice test equipment even if this stuff was very expencive and big. For me Agilent lost its face in the dirty war with Tektronix. Now that Tek is nearly out of the race Agilent starts another dirty war with LeCroy. Dirty because of the fact that they sale what they don't have and I dismiss a company that compares apples with oranges just to look good.  It's no shame to admit they doen't have 12bit resolution.
Poor Agilent, very poor.
I'm awaiting the day Agilent starts fighting against R&S.

No, they didn't. LeCroy was bought by Teledyne, plain and simple.

Where did you get this info from? My info is directly from LeCroy, they consolidated even if Teledyne is ten times bigger LeCroy was before. This is why the equipement is labled Teledyne LeCroy.

[T4P]

Are you serious? free_electron has a lab full of agilents and none of the "chinese low cost DSOs" and has used thousands of LeCraps (I myself, included) but agilent never proves him wrong
Could you go wrong with a Agilent? Certainly not. Not when you have lecroys that hang up on everything you do (And i'm not even talking about the Siglent SDS/ Lecroy WaveAce)

And you are still fighting about bit resolution. What's the point of 12-bit when the noise floor is lost on the 2-4 final bits on a 12bit ADC on low-level signals which is probably intended? Because when it comes to 1GHz+ you probably dont have a lot of voltage because that's how you gain speed
Why can USB be that fast? It's based on LVDS which is pretty low as far as i know

[free_electron]

The Agilent is just an 8bit scope with 16 times oversampling

not quite...
It has an 8 bit adc yes. But it's not exactly oversampling what they do.
The problem with making fast adc with many bits is that they become noisy and drift ( that's why the lecroy machines have that annoying'calibrating' cycle every fee minutes.

Then there is the front end noise. On a high bandwidth machine the inout scaler and preamps throw in more noise than one lsb of an 8 bit convertor. So slapping on a 12 bit adc at the rear end doesn't do you any good. All you do is digitize the system noise of the instrument.... Not of the subject under test.
So agilent tackles this a different way. Keep the 8 bit adc and employ a technique whereby you can get rid og the system noise. That gives you better detail of what the signal really looks like.

As far as I remember LeCroy is the one with the longer experience in DSOs, compared to Agilent.

lecroy comes from the physics world. their first machines were burst-samplers with the heavy lifting done by a cpu. HP made dso and msos long before lecroy.

Can you show me an example for the opposite?

Plenty. Look at the 4000 series machines, look at the 9000 and 90000 series.

Lecroy is pretty much stagnant. I have 7 different lecroys at work all the way back from the old picture tube ones to a 7zi...  Apart from sampling speed and memory options they're all the same. They have no advanced capabilities like packet decoding , syncing up with logic analysers , no dogital signals ( apart from a borked wavemaster where they bought an external la module that has never worked quite right. I have one.. Nobody wants to touch it after the disaster we have gone through with it.. I have a 12 page report with all the problems in the damn thing. Like showing you the wrong waveform, corrupting its own trace buffer and more.)

I work in an industry that is 'lecroy' heavy because of historical reasons ( they were for a while the only company that had deep memory. Now they have had to concede that to agilent as well.. ) so they are very much entrenched. But almost every lab i enter also has a few agilents around.. Because the lecroys are annoying and frustrating to work with .

My opinion is that Agilent lags LeCroy and not reverse. Agilent can do everthing but nothing right.

And my opinion has a long list of persistent problems ( with proof , i have been using the lecroys for 8 years now) like software lockups, bluescreens , endless calibrating cycles , slow response on buttons.
The 7zi is one of their flagships and it is plagued by things that simply should not be... Like the frontpanel stopping to work. You need to unplug it and replug it. Lecroy thought it would be a good idea if the front was detachable and then you can connect it using a usb cable. Problem is there is so much wiggle room and they use crappy pcb contacts like for a car radio removable front panel ( not even pogo pins) that it stops working if you jiggle it too much. I don't find that acceptable. Not at that price point. The buttons fall off. Yeach , you hard me right. Take the front panel , pop it off , flip it upside down and shake it. The rotary buttons fall off... The plastic seems te sag after a few age and they dont hold to the shafts of the encoders... If i move the scop from one bench to another i have to go pickup the trail of buttons i lost on the way...

All i have seen from lecroy are gimmicks like rotating screens and detachable panels . Give a swing on that timebase knob and they freeze , sometimes for 10 seconds, sometimes until you powercycle them. I have DDA and SDA serie machines that bluescreen if you turn the timebase button too fast. If you complain to them the answer is .. We don't support those anymore... Agilent still updates software , even for machines older than the DDA .
And the 7zi is a bloody hoover vacuum. Their architecture is : sample it , pump it through pci express and let a heavy quadcore cpu do the work. So in idle the scope is very quit. Start something remotely advanced and the quadcore fan goes nuts. I cant use it in a cubicle because the neighbours complain about the noise it makes... And its just windflow. It's not a rattling fan...
The scope is sluggish. An agilent scope behaves like an analog machine. Turn a knob and screen refresh is instantaneous. Not with the lecroys. Sometimes you turn a knob and it begins the 'calibrating,...'triggering'... 'Acquiring' cycle... That can tak 10 or more seconds.
If you are in the middle of troubleshooting something and looking around for clues that cycle becomes annoyin very fast....

But, in all fairness , there seems to be a new wind blowing at lecroy. Like i said in another topic (or was it this one). I had a chat with their product manager and gave him a detailed list of all my gripes and problems with their machines ( including screenshots and how to reproduce the problem )

The problems we have had over the years with their machines has made confidence in them very low to the point of being 'do not want, will not touch'. And that is actually very sad. Because they were once considered to be the rolls-royce of scopes.

[Wuerstchenhund]

This is for sure a fanboy territory here, because some guys here love the chineese low cost DSOs  so much and never had a real scope at hand so that they think this is state of the art. We are talking about professional equipment and this market is very clear (Tektronix, LeCroy, Agilent, R&S)

You are probably right about some people thinking that Chinese low cost scopes being the best thing since sliced bread, and of course you wouldn't use these scopes in a demanding work environment (and personally I wouldn't even use them at home, at least not as my primary instruments; I'd rather buy something older from the Big Names).

But we're not talking about Rigol here.

For me Agilent and HP are two different pairs of shoes, HP produced nice test equipment even if this stuff was very expencive and big. For me Agilent lost its face in the dirty war with Tektronix. Now that Tek is nearly out of the race Agilent starts another dirty war with LeCroy. Dirty because of the fact that they sale what they don't have and I dismiss a company that compares apples with oranges just to look good.  It's no shame to admit they doen't have 12bit resolution.
Poor Agilent, very poor.
I'm awaiting the day Agilent starts fighting against R&S.

I think you overstate a few things. First, Tektronix demise was brought on by themselves, not Agilent. Tek has completely mishandled the low end (which rakes in money just through the volumes), first they ignored it for too long, and nowadays they try to compete with the same technology from a decade ago while everyone else develops. Even their midrange offerings could use some refreshment, as they are loosing out to the competition there, too. And the highend isn't enough to keep the company afloat (that's why they had to be bought by Danaher, and that's why even LeCroy has come up with a low end series of scopes).

And as to Agilent marketing, I agree that they sometimes make their stuff look nicer than it really but that is why it's called marketing. And it's not only Agilent doing that, Tek did (and still does) the same. Or do you really expect when a manufacturer compares their own product with a competitor's product that you will get a fair and unbiased review?

No, they didn't. LeCroy was bought by Teledyne, plain and simple.

Where did you get this info from? My info is directly from LeCroy, they consolidated even if Teledyne is ten times bigger LeCroy was before. This is why the equipement is labled Teledyne LeCroy.

Look at the facts. LeCroy had a hard time financially and Teledyne wanted to extend their product range, so they bought LeCroy. It's not a merger because Teledyne LeCroy is a subsidiary of Teledyne (without LeCroy). LeCroy also has no say in other parts of Teledyne. And even the Teledyne press release speaks of an acquisition and not a merger, because it is no merger.

I know that staff (especially sales staff) tends to call these takeovers "merger" because they believe that it creates the image that both companies would be equal partners (which Teledyne and LeCroy aren't) while "acquisition" sound like they couldn't make it on their own and needed someone to foot the bill. But by all standards, it's an acquisition. LeCroy has been assimilated as a further subsidiary of Teledyne. 

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Teledyne seems to leave LeCroy quite a lot of freedom which reflects in their products (but frankly, the guy who decided it's a good idea to buy Siglent crap, paint it black and re-label it "LeCroy" should be shot!). In contrast, Danaher seems to keep the leash for Tek much shorter, again which shows in their products.

[branadic]

Meanwhile I tested further DSOs.
Yesterday I was shown the DSO9054H. This was nothing but disappointing because the device freezed a few times and the representative had to restart it. 
Furthermore he wasn't able to reproduce the measurement I asked for as a good example made with the HDO6000:
- record the characteristic of a customer LVDT (1MHz sinus) on two channels with 200ms/div
- show the envelope of the difference of the two channels
- plot the continuous changing phase between both channels as a track, trend or how ever you want to call it

He left the building with the scope and asked me for a new appointment next week. 
I confirmed to give him a second chance. We'll see what is coming soon.

I today had a so called R&S representative showing me the RTO1004 with me. This was again very, very disappointing as this guy had absolut no knowledge of what the DSO could affort. 
He repeated a few learned by heart phrases that can be read on R&S website but was sitting in front of the device penetrating the touch screen without distinguishable goal. None of my questions he was able to answer and most of them he even didn't understood.
After a few questions later and him touching the screen planless he told me that I can call the support and see that they are well qualified (otherwhise him he forgot to mention).
I then had a longer phone call with the support while him sitting beside me without any plan what we were talking about.
The call was again disappointing as the support also wasn't able to overcome the task. All in all the RTO1004 is not much better compared to my TDS5104B (16Mpt/ch.), a little bit bigger memory (up to 200Mpt/ch.),  somewhat faster?, a touch screen, some color gimmicks (you can set a custom color to the channels and a RGB led in the front panel "channel menu" changes to your specified color), some screen splitting functions and a better/faster fft, that "can replace a spectrum analyzer", also one of his learned phrases. A spectrum analyzer with only 600MHz analog bandwidth? Okay, if you realy believe that, fine!
But hey, all this is not an argument for such a big investment. He left the building, with the scope as you might expected. 
His last words were: "If I had known your task before I had sent you a product manager." Damn, are you serious? How can R&S believe that such an *'%$s!# can sell a product like this?

Awaiting the second chance for Agilent next week.

[Hydrawerk]

Rohde&Schwarz RTO1004 might be a decent  scope, but why no separate controls for each channel 

[branadic]

Okay, small update.
Agilent had it's second chance to show the power of the DSO9054 in the A-Version (oversampling mode for 12bit manually activatable), not H (oversampling mode fixed activated) and I tested the scope another week. Nice scope, but often it is doing something without giving a feedback what exactly. It feels very slow, even if a smaller capture memory size is choosen. It stucks to very slow operating speed with the full 500Mpt. active.
The big/deep memory is already installed into all devices and can be activated by a code. I hate this concept of hardware options, as this option cost 20.000€ + taxes in here. The device itself only cost about 13-14 k€ + taxes with some minor options active.
Most of the display is filled with function buttons so the effective signal display is very small. The operating concept produces many interrogation marks and it often makes no real sence how it is structured. They have to do some homework on that. All in all it wasn't able to hold a candle to the HDO6000 and we don't need this bus analyzing stuff.

However, I decided for the HDO6054 with 250Mpt./ch. and got a very good offer for it, how much is my little secret.
It arrived this monday and I'm very happy with it. The whole operating concept is amazing intuitive and I could do first current consumption measurements very fast. Again, I'm the opinion that this is the todays perfect combination of analog and digital scope in a single device.

Dave, you should give it a go for a review.

[nctnico]

How many ADC bits make sense BTW? They spec the input amplifier at 55 dB SNR ... so that's already 2 bits buried in noise

That is a good question. A big problem is clock jitter. I really doubt the designers of entry level scopes with interleaved ADCs have really thought about clock jitter and the impact on the noise.

These two links have some good explainations:
http://cds.linear.com/docs/en/design-note/dn1013f.pdf
http://www.dsplog.com/2012/02/22/adc-snr-clock-jitter-quantization-noise/

[madmax]

Hi all, just few considerations:

1) LeCroy HDO6000 has a real 12 bit ADC. 55dB SNR, means about 9.2 ENOB.....
2) Agilent 9000H is a classic 8 bit ADC with no more than 38-40dB SNR (in 8 bit mode) that uses the old "oversampling" technology (called High resolution) just to try to compete against LeCroy
3) Agilent calls this "new" technology Hypersamplig....just a simple Oversampling. They explain this clearly on their datasheet....
4) Why Agilent is not specifying the SNR? As you can see their DC Gain Accuracy is just 2%, as in the classic 8 bit scope....with oversampling you don't get more accuracy....
5) Agilent has more memory, but how many memory can be really used by the scope to do analysis? LeCroy can do the FFT on 250Mpoints quickly, ask Agilent to do a real FFT on 250M points!!

I don't want to say if Agilent is better or LeCroy is better, but it's correct to say that LeCroy has the only 12 bit HW in the world and that their SW is very good (Histogram, Track, Trend, etc)
...

Just try it and then everyone will do his considerations.

[Hydrawerk]

LeCroy has only 2.5 GS/s. Not much for a 1GHz scope. Well, the HDO6000 and DSO9000H scopes are different. It's hard to say which one is better.

[madmax]

LeCroy has only 2.5 GS/s. Not much for a 1GHz scope. Well, the HDO6000 and DSO9000H scopes are different. It's hard to say which one is better.

Only 2.5Gs/s....for a 12bit ADC is the top technology in the world....if you want an 8 bit ADC take a LeCroy WaveRunner 6Z that can reach 40Gs/s....
The 9000H is a "classic" 8 bit scope, everyone has got it!!!! LeCroy can reach 40Gs/s, Agilent 20Gs/s
On 12 bit HW ADC only LeCroy has a solution...these is the reality...

[Hydrawerk]

Oh, these scopes are expensive as a good car. Hobbyists cannot think about them...