New 2GHz touchscreen scope from Tek, June 6th

[snoopy]

Awful video.

I like the stacked mode. All 'scopes should do that.

One thing that annoys me about the release of this scope is the lack of videos from Tektronix espousing the virtues of this scope and yet what is available is slim pickings and small grabs of bits and pieces of this and that A big fail on Teks part. There really is no excuse considering that they have lots of instructional videos for their other scopes. This just leads to speculation and confusion regarding the scopes capability. A big fail here for the marketing department

[Howardlong]

Awful video.

I like the stacked mode. All 'scopes should do that.

Agreed.

[BrianH_Tektronix]

Awful video.

I like the stacked mode. All 'scopes should do that.

One thing that annoys me about the release of this scope is the lack of videos from Tektronix espousing the virtues of this scope and yet what is available is slim pickings and small grabs of bits and pieces of this and that A big fail on Teks part. There really is no excuse considering that they have lots of instructional videos for their other scopes. This just leads to speculation and confusion regarding the scopes capability. A big fail here for the marketing department

Sure lets make a video of every single awesome feature... we would love unlimited marketing resources. 

Those other instructional videos came out over time. So just wait, we have many more coming. W2AEW has a few he's working on as well 

[egonotto]

Hello,

@BrianH_Tektronix

What is a point?

In Datasheet the memory is measured in points.
Is a point 8 bits or 12 bits or even 16 bits?

If the ADC is in 8 bit mode, is a point (sample) in memory 8 bit or even 12 bit?
If the ADC is in 12 bit mode, is a point (sample) in memory 12 bit or only 8 bit?

Best regards
egonotto

[BrianH_Tektronix]

Hello,

@BrianH_Tektronix

What is a point?

In Datasheet the memory is measured in points.
Is a point 8 bits or 12 bits or even 16 bits?

If the ADC is in 8 bit mode, is a point (sample) in memory 8 bit or even 12 bit?
If the ADC is in 12 bit mode, is a point (sample) in memory 12 bit or only 8 bit?

Best regards
egonotto

Hello egonotto,

I'm assuming you mean the 62.5Mpoints or optional 125Mpoints? Points in this case refers to the digital horizontal record length that has been stored in memory. The M is for Million. Points just means how many individual data points are captured horizontally in an acquisition (think about each one having a time stamp and data value vertically). By default the scope can adjust up to 62.5 million points per channel in a single acquisition. With the 5-RL-125M option you can capture up to 125 million points in a single acquisition per channel.

Each point is going to be stored as either 8-bits or 16-bits (1 byte or 2 bytes) of data. When at 12-bits or in High Res mode the data is transferred in 16-bits per point. The ADC regardless of data transfer is a 12-bit ADC, you just transfer 8-bits of data at 6.25GS/s or 16-bits of data at 3.125GS/s or lower sample rates.

Hope this help 

[ruairi]

It's funny to me how often engineers lament how little marketing folks understand about tech but fail to see that it goes the other way too.  Good marketing is just as difficult to do as good engineering.  You need the people, the resources, the time and a product that warrants the investment. 

Many engineers have a hard time communicating a good idea to a human standing in front of them, communicating to the entire world is an art and when it's done well it looks effortless, just like good engineering.  I've spent some time in the the world of marketing and it taught me a lot about the challenges of cutting through the noise and the constraints that a corporation will put on you.

I"m not the target market for this scope, my RTB2004 was a stretch for me. It looks like a great product, and I'm glad to see Tek take back some ground,

[tszaboo]

Awful video.

I like the stacked mode. All 'scopes should do that.

One thing that annoys me about the release of this scope is the lack of videos from Tektronix espousing the virtues of this scope and yet what is available is slim pickings and small grabs of bits and pieces of this and that A big fail on Teks part. There really is no excuse considering that they have lots of instructional videos for their other scopes. This just leads to speculation and confusion regarding the scopes capability. A big fail here for the marketing department

Sure lets make a video of every single awesome feature... we would love unlimited marketing resources. 

Those other instructional videos came out over time. So just wait, we have many more coming. W2AEW has a few he's working on as well 

You spent years to create a new scope. There is no excuse not to spend days to create the needed marketing manual. Yes, you can just try to show the front panel to the people and say:
"Look! It has moar things. Now gimmi money"
This would probably work, if a scope is an emotional purchase, like a house or a car. Its not. It is a tool, from a manufacturer, with a wore-down reputation. Yes, you milked the people with the TDS2000 series too long (look, it has moar bandwidth, and no features you actually need!).
I know, it is hard to see this from the inside, but here is my 2 cents: There are people who dont like your company, not anymore at least. I am one of those people. If I go to a lab, and I see a TDS2000, my eyes start to twiching, because of previous encounters with it. In fact, this is extended now, if I see any Tek scope, I expect the worst. So there you go. This is your reputation, tell the marketing people. Maybe they can salvage it somehow.

[snoopy]

Awful video.

I like the stacked mode. All 'scopes should do that.

One thing that annoys me about the release of this scope is the lack of videos from Tektronix espousing the virtues of this scope and yet what is available is slim pickings and small grabs of bits and pieces of this and that A big fail on Teks part. There really is no excuse considering that they have lots of instructional videos for their other scopes. This just leads to speculation and confusion regarding the scopes capability. A big fail here for the marketing department

Sure lets make a video of every single awesome feature... we would love unlimited marketing resources. 

Those other instructional videos came out over time. So just wait, we have many more coming. W2AEW has a few he's working on as well 

Come on now. Surely it doesn't take much to make a short video and upload it to Youtube ? It doesn't have to be anything fancy. Just someone who knows the scope with a camera in front of them using a particular feature will do for now.

[TheSteve]

So I'm not the only one who thought it was a little odd that Tek didn't have a great 20-30 minute video showing off the new scope series ready for June 6th.

[snoopy]

So I'm not the only one who thought it was a little odd that Tek didn't have a great 20-30 minute video showing off the new scope series ready for June 6th.

No probably because the marketing department spent all of their time get the font angle right LOL

[Hugoneus]

I tried to cover some of it in my video.

[TheSteve]

I tried to cover some of it in my video.

Your video was a great intro to the scope - but you don't work for Tek.
I think I just feel most companies who build excitement for a new product and tease us with a release date would have something special planned for that release date, such as a video. No question it looks like a great piece of gear and I look forward to your full review.

[nctnico]

I'd rather watch an independant review which also shows the ugly parts (if there are any) than marketing material.

[snoopy]

I tried to cover some of it in my video.

Yes and you have already done a better job than Tek did. Perhaps they should sack their marketing department and employ yourself

[JPortici]

Hello,

@BrianH_Tektronix

What is a point?

In Datasheet the memory is measured in points.
Is a point 8 bits or 12 bits or even 16 bits?

If the ADC is in 8 bit mode, is a point (sample) in memory 8 bit or even 12 bit?
If the ADC is in 12 bit mode, is a point (sample) in memory 12 bit or only 8 bit?

Best regards
egonotto

Hello egonotto,

I'm assuming you mean the 62.5Mpoints or optional 125Mpoints? Points in this case refers to the digital horizontal record length that has been stored in memory. The M is for Million. Points just means how many individual data points are captured horizontally in an acquisition (think about each one having a time stamp and data value vertically). By default the scope can adjust up to 62.5 million points per channel in a single acquisition. With the 5-RL-125M option you can capture up to 125 million points in a single acquisition per channel.

Each point is going to be stored as either 8-bits or 16-bits (1 byte or 2 bytes) of data. When at 12-bits or in High Res mode the data is transferred in 16-bits per point. The ADC regardless of data transfer is a 12-bit ADC, you just transfer 8-bits of data at 6.25GS/s or 16-bits of data at 3.125GS/s or lower sample rates.

Hope this help 

i'll try to rephrase.. or i will ask a new question.
so you say that i t is 62.5 / 125 Mpts.. but depending on the acquisition mode the "point" is from 8 to 12 to 16 bits, correct? so, does this means that in 8 bit mode half of the memory is wasted (why couldn't we have 125/250 Mpts @ 8 bit?) or that when in > 8 bit modes the memory is actually halved?

[LazyJack]

Hello,

@BrianH_Tektronix

What is a point?

In Datasheet the memory is measured in points.
Is a point 8 bits or 12 bits or even 16 bits?

If the ADC is in 8 bit mode, is a point (sample) in memory 8 bit or even 12 bit?
If the ADC is in 12 bit mode, is a point (sample) in memory 12 bit or only 8 bit?

Best regards
egonotto

Hello egonotto,

I'm assuming you mean the 62.5Mpoints or optional 125Mpoints? Points in this case refers to the digital horizontal record length that has been stored in memory. The M is for Million. Points just means how many individual data points are captured horizontally in an acquisition (think about each one having a time stamp and data value vertically). By default the scope can adjust up to 62.5 million points per channel in a single acquisition. With the 5-RL-125M option you can capture up to 125 million points in a single acquisition per channel.

Each point is going to be stored as either 8-bits or 16-bits (1 byte or 2 bytes) of data. When at 12-bits or in High Res mode the data is transferred in 16-bits per point. The ADC regardless of data transfer is a 12-bit ADC, you just transfer 8-bits of data at 6.25GS/s or 16-bits of data at 3.125GS/s or lower sample rates.

Hope this help 

i'll try to rephrase.. or i will ask a new question.
so you say that i t is 62.5 / 125 Mpts.. but depending on the acquisition mode the "point" is from 8 to 12 to 16 bits, correct? so, does this means that in 8 bit mode half of the memory is wasted (why couldn't we have 125/250 Mpts @ 8 bit?) or that when in > 8 bit modes the memory is actually halved?

I have no idea why it is so, but i can think of a lot of good reasons. I don't think Tek engineers are now slapping their forehead saying how we haven't thought of this. 
If I had to guess, I'd say the internal datapath is 16bits, regardless of the actual resolution. It would actually take additional measures to write 8 bit sized data at odd and even addresses, which may be quite serious at these speeds. The memory may not even be byte addressable.
It is in somewhat similar fashion like a lot of CPUs have restrictions on what sized data can go at what addresses.
It is certainly not impossible, but I guess some technical or financial tradeoffs are involved and Tek decided to go this way. Also, we do not know if the memory is really wasted. It may very well happen that some information is stored in those other 8 bits.
This is all speculation on my side though.

[JPortici]

i also think that the datapath is 16 bits... or a multiple of 16, which would explain the samplerate being halved..
2 x 8 bit transfert @3.125 -> 6.25
or
1 x 16bit transfert @3.125

then, there is no "wasted memory" because you either have one point, increased resolution or two points, standard resolution

does this make any sense?

[EEVblog]

Sure lets make a video of every single awesome feature... we would love unlimited marketing resources. 

Seriously?
You have been developing this thing for years, internal demo units were moving around the world >6 months ago, you spent oodles of money and time on the website marketing and promo and those professionally shot "reaction" videos, yet you couldn't organise for one competent engineer like W2AEW to sit down a for a couple of days and make a bunch of videos?
Really?

Seriously, it would have taken less work than those teaser reaction videos you did.

I agree, you screwed that up, someone simply wasn't in charge of making that happen. Of if they were, and they deemed the reaction videos more important, then they are incompetent.

[EEVblog]

It's funny to me how often engineers lament how little marketing folks understand about tech but fail to see that it goes the other way too.  Good marketing is just as difficult to do as good engineering.  You need the people, the resources, the time and a product that warrants the investment. 

Many engineers have a hard time communicating a good idea to a human standing in front of them, communicating to the entire world is an art and when it's done well it looks effortless, just like good engineering.  I've spent some time in the the world of marketing and it taught me a lot about the challenges of cutting through the noise and the constraints that a corporation will put on you.

Come on. W2AEW works for them and could churn out a dozen short videos on the features in a few days. Tek must know this, yet he clearly wasn't tasked to do so. Although he did do one very cool video, but that was only uploaded onto the Tek Youtube channel 2 day ago
Maybe he did that off his own bat?
And anyone who wants to claim that Tek doesn't have anyone else who can do it, that BS. They got Gary Waldo to do a "5 minute overview" promo videos and he did a respectable job of that and it was fairly professionally shot. Whilst it showed some cool stuff, it was as advertised, a short overview.
Tek clearly didn't understand that their target market want to see technical videos with detail.
They failed, and it wasn't because of a lack of resources, it was a lack of vision and execution, and a lack of understanding of what people want on launch day.
But of course it all doesn't mean much. But perhaps they can do better next time?

[nctnico]

i'll try to rephrase.. or i will ask a new question.
so you say that i t is 62.5 / 125 Mpts.. but depending on the acquisition mode the "point" is from 8 to 12 to 16 bits, correct? so, does this means that in 8 bit mode half of the memory is wasted (why couldn't we have 125/250 Mpts @ 8 bit?) or that when in > 8 bit modes the memory is actually halved?

That information also needs to be processed and that is where many oscilloscopes with deep memory fall flat on their face: lots of data but no ability to process it. So I think the tradeoff is not about wasting memory but having enough processing resources to do something useful with the data being collected.

[David Hess]

i'll try to rephrase.. or i will ask a new question.
so you say that i t is 62.5 / 125 Mpts.. but depending on the acquisition mode the "point" is from 8 to 12 to 16 bits, correct? so, does this means that in 8 bit mode half of the memory is wasted (why couldn't we have 125/250 Mpts @ 8 bit?) or that when in > 8 bit modes the memory is actually halved?

That information also needs to be processed and that is where many oscilloscopes with deep memory fall flat on their face: lots of data but no ability to process it. So I think the tradeoff is not about wasting memory but having enough processing resources to do something useful with the data being collected.

The processing record is always going to be 16 bits or more to support high resolution decimation, averaging, and other processing of the acquisition record so the record length is specified in points no matter what data size is stored in it.  Based on what BrianH_Tektronix said, it is appears that the throughput between the digitizer and memory will not support the highest sample rate at 16 bits per sample so in that case, 8 bit samples are transferred instead of 16 bit samples but these are still stored in 16 bit memory.  In view of the below 8 bit effective number of bits that the ADC provides (1), this makes perfect sense and nothing is lost.

In theory then the record length could double at the highest sample rate but then there would be no room to process it like with a Rigol and averaging and high resolution decimation would only reduce noise without providing higher resolution.

(1) The MS5 datasheet does not give this number at the highest sampling rate but my guess is 6.5 bits.

[snoopy]

Sure lets make a video of every single awesome feature... we would love unlimited marketing resources. 

Seriously?
You have been developing this thing for years, internal demo units were moving around the world >6 months ago, you spent oodles of money and time on the website marketing and promo and those professionally shot "reaction" videos, yet you couldn't organise for one competent engineer like W2AEW to sit down a for a couple of days and make a bunch of videos?
Really?

Seriously, it would have taken less work than those teaser reaction videos you did.

I agree, you screwed that up, someone simply wasn't in charge of making that happen. Of if they were, and they deemed the reaction videos more important, then they are incompetent.

It is a wasted opportunity not to have those videos ready to go I cannot see how anyone could overlook this !! They seem to have put more effort into the brochure but a picture or video paints a thousand words We are all arguing about the supposed capabilities of this scope simply because there is inadequate information available that could have easily been condensed into a series of some 5 min videos Also these days some people prefer to get their instructional information from a youtube video rather than 500 page pdf manual ! It's a no-brainer !!

It looks like a great product - I was hoping to see more 

[nctnico]

Also these days some people prefer to get their instructional information from a youtube video rather than 500 page pdf manual ! It's a no-brainer !!

I find watching videos very inefficient. Please give me a manual with an index so I can skip over the irrelevant parts.

[JPortici]

but videos can give you that little extra that you probably wouldn't get in a manual:
-hands on use
-see the actual instrument at work
-cool stuff like in W2AEW's video

but i agree, bullshit marketing videos with nothing but renders and eerie music are useless

[rsjsouza]

It's funny to me how often engineers lament how little marketing folks understand about tech but fail to see that it goes the other way too.  Good marketing is just as difficult to do as good engineering.  You need the people, the resources, the time and a product that warrants the investment. 

Many engineers have a hard time communicating a good idea to a human standing in front of them, communicating to the entire world is an art and when it's done well it looks effortless, just like good engineering.  I've spent some time in the the world of marketing and it taught me a lot about the challenges of cutting through the noise and the constraints that a corporation will put on you.

Come on. W2AEW works for them and could churn out a dozen short videos on the features in a few days. Tek must know this, yet he clearly wasn't tasked to do so.

Coming from a corporate POV I understand Brian's and ruairi's points. I don't know the size of Tek's technical marketing team, but as a person working on a technical role for a large manufacturer which also does product release and promotion on the sidelines, I can tell that it is no easy feat to churn out polished short videos while juggling between the roles of customer support, testing/evaluation of new products, technical content creation and maintenance for each new released product. Tek is a large company, but I am pretty sure there is a lot of compartmentalization with limited resources that imposes prioritization of tasks when a product is released. As you said before, such class of equipment would have never attracted this much attention, thus indicating they did something right. 

And anyone who wants to claim that Tek doesn't have anyone else who can do it, that BS. They got Gary Waldo to do a "5 minute overview" promo videos and he did a respectable job of that and it was fairly professionally shot. Whilst it showed some cool stuff, it was as advertised, a short overview.

In my opinion that is fine: give a short intro or overview and then feed the product to the sharks for a proper evaluation, given that any corporate review would be seen as heavily biased, incomplete or would be criticized in a way or another.

Tek clearly didn't understand that their target market want to see technical videos with detail.

I like videos as well, but honestly the target market for this oscilloscope is either getting loaners to play around or receiving a visit from Tek's representative to their own site. 

They failed, and it wasn't because of a lack of resources, it was a lack of vision and execution, and a lack of understanding of what people want on launch day.

In my opinion: damned if you do, damned if you don't. Larger crowds find short videos more appealing, which would attract criticism as being superficial, incomplete or too focused on the features that overshadow the competition. Longer reviews tend to fall into nctnico's point: just give me a decent manual or, as I said before, just come to my company and let me play with a few of them.