EDUX1000 I2C/SPI/RS232 Decoder: $190
Does that imply that the decodes for other models are more expensive ?
I think a problem they have is that they risk competing with their own 2000X series. Probably why there's no 4ch version.
It's certainly a big improvement on the very tired Rigol badged model, and I'm sure it will sell because of Keysight's brand reputation.
If they had included decodes and func gen as standard it could have been a much bigger deal - AFIAK nobody is yet including decodes as standard, which in these days when pretty much everything has an MCU is just ridiculous.
I'm guessing the marketing suits thought the Tek TBS was real competiion and not a sad joke.
Do we know if the EDU will be on general sale, or just to educational establishments ? I can sort of see that 100kpts isn't a big deal in education, but as we all know it's just hardware crippling, it still feels like a bit of a rip-off.
BTW another major manufacturer is releasing a new scope in about 2 weeks' time. Don't know how it's positioned market-wise but may know soon
90% of the work we do is one channel, 2 channels won't matter for basic stuff, especially teaching. Funnily enough, the only time I worked with 4-channel scopes is when I worked at a company making RF amps, we still only used 1 channel but bought 4-channel scopes because we used to blow up a 50-Ohm input every week and it was cheaper to send one back for repair each month than once a fortnight!
It looks like the EDU model is marketing spin, just as Tek did with their -EDU model (2.5k memory!). Now that was a company selling on brand name, the product was 20 years old in a new box.
I spoke to a Keysight distributor this morning, he said education customers get a discount but they can sell both EDU and DSO models to anyone. They said they have to prove to Keysight it was an education site to offer the discount, or they don't get any support and basically make a loss on the sale. Volume discount to Universities would put this on par with all the cheap stuff from China but with software, extra features, warranty and support, it's no-brainer to go with a premium brand in such a case.
We had a couple of Agilent X2000s a few years ago, some additional features were unlocked with a (genuine) firmware upgrade a year or so later. Apparently there will be another firmware upgrade soon for the 2000 and the distributor is expecting more things to become unlocked as standard, so existing customers don't lose out. Maybe there's no need to hack it and invalidate the warranty after all.