New Zhiyuan ZDS2022 scope released

[pascal_sweden]

I will keep you posted!

For me this stuff is just too weird, not to further investigate

[Hydrawerk]

There were some new models released, like ZDS4000 series. http://www.zlg.com/Osc/Osc/index.html
They have that Tektronix-like waveform inspector.
http://www.zlg.cn/osc/osc/product/id/135.html

[pascal_sweden]

I emailed them back in May but never received an answer from them!

Regarding the new ZDS4000 series:

    Bandwidth: 500M, 350M, 200M
    Sampling rate: 4G Sa/s
    Memory depth: 512Mpts
    Waveform capture rate: 1Mwfms/s

That's a whopping memory and waveform capture rate!

Note that they talk about waveform capture rate, which is not the same as waveform update rate!

[Hydrawerk]

I think these scopes are not distributed outside China.

[pascal_sweden]

They are not cheap either!

[crazyguy]

I emailed them back in May but never received an answer from them!

Regarding the new ZDS4000 series:

    Bandwidth: 500M, 350M, 200M
    Sampling rate: 4G Sa/s
    Memory depth: 512Mpts
    Waveform capture rate: 1Mwfms/s

That's a whopping memory and waveform capture rate!

Note that they talk about waveform capture rate, which is not the same as waveform update rate!

no, according to the website data, the figure > 1Mwfrms/s is waveform update rate


update :

on their English website : they use the term "waveform capture rate"
http://www.zlg.com/osc/osc/index.html

on their Chinese website : the term used is "waveform update rate"
http://www.zlg.cn/osc/osc/product/id/126.html

[Muxr]

Those original pictures don't look like renderings.. photoshopped maybe with good lighting but they are real.. The display is probably just a screenshot photoshopped on.

If they can provide better software than Rigols and Siglents than there might be room for them in the market perhaps.

[zapta]

Remember that you are looking at computer rendering. Look at actual pictures in the first link and you will see that they are not much better than Rigol.

I don't think this:

Looks better than:



In fact, I think it looks much worse?

The design of the Rigol's panel was inspired by these road markings:

[jjoonathan]

Sure, but the DS1054Z is a tiny little thing. The lines are much straighter on my Rigol DS4014, which I suspect is more in line with the size of these scopes.

What's the difference between waveform capture and update rate?

[Muxr]

Sure, but the DS1054Z is a tiny little thing. The lines are much straighter on my Rigol DS4014, which I suspect is more in line with the size of these scopes.

What's the difference between waveform capture and update rate?

Waveform capture sounds like the sampling rate, but they mean the update rate on the screen. 1Mwfms/s seems like quite a lot.. kind of doubt it to be honest.

[jjoonathan]

Sure, but the DS1054Z is a tiny little thing. The lines are much straighter on my Rigol DS4014, which I suspect is more in line with the size of these scopes.

What's the difference between waveform capture and update rate?

Waveform capture sounds like the sampling rate, but they mean the update rate on the screen. 1Mwfms/s seems like quite a lot.. kind of doubt it to be honest.

Yeah, even ultra-fast TN gaming monitors switch 1000x slower, and they're designed to push generously past the limits of perception. I think we can safely assume it's a capture rate.

[pascal_sweden]

The Siglent SDS2000X has some special mode to achieve higher amount of waveforms per second, but as Dave tested in his video, it turns out to be a waveform capture rate instead of a waveform update rate, as you can only see it after the capture has been made in memory, and you can not see it live.

[TheAmmoniacal]

I will contact ZLG tomorrow and ask them if they look for a distributor in Scandinavia and Benelux

Will keep you posted on my conversation! Stay tuned =)

If you become a distributor, give me a job! I can do email support, haha.

ZLG's gear looks nice.

[Wuerstchenhund]

Yeah, even ultra-fast TN gaming monitors switch 1000x slower, and they're designed to push generously past the limits of perception. I think we can safely assume it's a capture rate.

The reality is that no scope with a LCD screen as display can achieve a true display rate of anything close than 1M wfms/s, or even 10k wfms/s, not even a Keysight DSOX3000. It's simply impossible when the physical screen refresh is some fixed at 60Hz or so. What the scopes can do is to collect display data between refreshes in a buffer and then update the screen at the next refresh cycle. Which is close enough.

The waveform update rate, for which the better term would be trigger rate, simply describes how many time per second a scope can update the waveform data in its memory. On an analog scope where the CRT phosphor acts as both, waveform memory and display memory, the display rate obviously follows the trigger rate, which could reach in excess of 600k triggers/s. Which means the trigger rate is limited by timebase (the time it takes for the beam to sweep from left to right), the trigger re-arm time, and the time for the electron beam to fly back to its initial position.

On a DSO, the trigger rate is limited by memory length (larger memory leads to longer time to complete an acquisition cycle), trigger re-arm time, and backend processing (how fast can the captured data be processed and fed to display memory) but not the display refresh rate (which, again, will stay at 60Hz or whatever it is). With modern real-time DSOs with fast ADCs which cretae large amounts of data, the limiting factor in regard to the trigger rate is the backend processing. Some digital scopes (i.e. Tektronix) have special modes where some or all analysis/measurement functionality is disabled to provide more ressources for waveform processing, leading to higher trigger rates. Keysight deals with it through its own proprietory waveform processor (MegaZoom), LeCroy through its high bandwidth architecture (X-Stream).

In regards to these Zhiyuan scopes, I pretty much doubt that they can reach anything close to 1M wfms/s, not as display updat rate nor as trigger rate.

[nctnico]

The Siglent SDS2000X has some special mode to achieve higher amount of waveforms per second, but as Dave tested in his video, it turns out to be a waveform capture rate instead of a waveform update rate, as you can only see it after the capture has been made in memory, and you can not see it live.

That is called segmented recording. Most DSOs have that ability.

[jashugan]

I saw those oscilloscope in Electronica, Munich, in these days, and I have to say I have been surprised how responsive and good are.
I mailed them, but the prices the technician told me were not low at all (surprised in negative way, unfortunately): ZDS2000 4 channel plus at maximum is 3000$, while ZDS4000 4 channel at maximum is about 10k $.
I saw the lowest ZDS2000 range is about 1k$, which is good, compared the performance of the scope.

Anyway, I asked some documentation. I'll keep you updated!

[pascal_sweden]

Do they already have a distributor in Europe?

I mailed them back in May 2016, but never got a response from them.

Below is my email for reference:

Dear Sir/Miss,

I wanted to reach out to you, to hear if your company already has a distributor in Scandinavia
and Benelux for your Zhiyuan Test&Measurement product line, such as digital oscilloscope,
digital multi-meter, logic analyzer, mutiple instrument, isolated probe?

I am very impressed by the features of your digital oscilloscope:
http://www.zlg.cn/Osc

The same counts for your other products:
http://www.zlg.cn/Multimeter
http://www.zlg.cn/La
http://www.zlg.cn/Mi

Do you have support for the English language in your UI?

Are your products certified for the European market?
CE mark, EMC tests, other certifications, etc.?

Do you already have a distributor in Europe and/or the US?

Maybe we can talk about the distributor partnership in more details on a Skype session?

Below are some more questions that we could discuss over Skype.

Best regards,

Pascal

==========================================
Additional questions about Zhiyuan T&M products
==========================================

Target users
===========

What target users do you foresee for your scopes?

Are we talking here students, hobbyists, small business users, professional companies?

How do you position your oscilloscope compared to other A-brands or other Chinese brands?

Isolated front-end
================

Does the scope have an isolated front-end?

Can it be used to measure floating measurements?

How about the ground of the BNCs for both channels? Are they separate or common?

Input protection
==============

Do you have input protection for the analog front-end?

What about input protection for the digital inputs of the logic analyzer?

Can you provide more details about the input protection in your product?

Background noise level
====================

Can you provide details about the background noise level of your oscilloscope?

How do you compare, compared to the overview of noise levels that I provided in attachment.

See attachment for a comparison between Siglent, GW-Instek, Rigol and Keysight.

Protocol decoder
===============

Which protocols do you support?

Do you plan to add more protocols in the future?

Have you implemented the protocol decoder in hardware or do you do the decoding
in software?

Do you have examples on performance measurements when decoding a protocol?

Do you plan support for the Sigrok framework?
https://sigrok.org/

Waveform update rate
===================

What is the waveform update rate in your product?

Most of the cheap Chinese oscilloscopes these days have waveform update rates
that are bigger than 30.000 waveforms/sec.

How do you compare?

Intensity grading waveform display
=============================

Do you support an intensity grading waveform display?

How many color levels do you support?

Here is an example of intensity grading on a cheap Rigol oscilloscope and Siglent oscilloscope:

http://images.batronix.com/products/oscilloscopes/Rigol/DS1000Z/intensity-grading.jpg

https://mediacdn.eu/m/media/catalog/product/s/d/sds2004x-2_1.jpg

FFT in software
=============

Do you support FFT in the software?

How many points do you use for the FFT? Are we talking Kpoints or Mpoints here?

Sampling memory
===============

How big is the sampling memory in your product?

The entry level scope from Rigol has a 24MPts sample memory (12MPts enabled standard).

How do you compare?

External trigger input and Pass-Fail output
===================================

Does your product have an external trigger input?

Does your product have an external Pass-Fail output?

Chinese oscilloscope manufacturers
==============================

Is your company familiar with brands such as Rigol, Siglent, GW-Instek?

Rigol DS1054Z:
http://www.rigol.eu/products/digital-oscilloscopes/ds1000Z/ds1054z/

Siglent SDS1104X:
http://www.siglent.com/ENs/pdxx.aspx?id=1133&T=2&tid=1

GW-Instek GDS-1000B:
http://www.gwinstek.com/en-US/products/Oscilloscopes/Digital_Storage_Oscilloscopes/GDS-1000B

Do you see them as competitors, or is your product for a different target market?

Optimal hardware architecture for a digital oscilloscope
==============================================

Are you following the latest trends of the oscilloscope market?

Are you also using the Xilinx Zynq-7000 architecture in your products?

The company GW-Instek is using this:
http://www.xilinx.com/publications/prod_mktg/zynq7000/goodwill-casestudy.pdf

[ebastler]

Do they already have a distributor in Europe?
I mailed them back in May 2016, but never got a response from them.
Below is my email for reference: [...]

I am sure they were delighted to be swamped with more than two dozen questions on first contact! 

Maybe a different approach next time would increase the chance of actually receving a reply?

[pascal_sweden]

I provided them my question list upfront, to convince them that I am a professional player and not a new kid on the block

[pascal_sweden]

They talked about this scope on the Owon forum:
http://owon.freeforums.org/new-advanced-zlg-oscilloscopes-t49.html

The support level seems quite impressive. See picture below.

[ebastler]

I provided them my question list upfront, to convince them that I am a professional player and not a new kid on the block

Or it might have convinced them that you are an amateur with way too much time on your hands...
(Which, given this dialog, both of us might be?  )

[ataradov]

Or it might have convinced them that you are an amateur with way too much time on your hands...

Does it really matter? I'm a person with money. They either want to sell or not. In this case seems to be the later. That's fine their scopes are expensive, and there is a new wave of equipment in the same price range from real manufacturers.

[coppice]

I provided them my question list upfront, to convince them that I am a professional player and not a new kid on the block

Or it might have convinced them that you are an amateur with way too much time on your hands...
(Which, given this dialog, both of us might be?  )

He asked questions that sound like insults, and asked if how they would compare their scopes to ones with lower specs. What sort of response was he expecting?

[ataradov]

He asked questions that sound like insults, and asked if how they would compare their scopes to ones with lower specs. What sort of response was he expecting?

In western "culture" it is a proper question. It is salesman's job to convince me that I should buy his product and not competitor's. And in western companies sales people have "fighing guides" prepared by marketing comparing everything to everything. If you are better than competition, then you should be able to prove it, otherwise, bye bye.

[coppice]

Or it might have convinced them that you are an amateur with way too much time on your hands...

Does it really matter? I'm a person with money. They either want to sell or not. In this case seems to be the later. That's fine their scopes are expensive, and there is a new wave of equipment in the same price range from real manufacturers.

What constitutes a real manufacturer? ZLG has been a good source of tools since before, say, Siglent started. I don't think they've ever tried to export, though.