Everyone complains about the vertical knobs. I am a huge analog fanboy, trust me - I love having all my controls separate. But look at the number of things a lot of modern DSOs can display: Ch 1 - 4, multiple reference waveforms, FFT, logic decodes sometimes, blah blah blah blah. Your choices are 1) Separate knobs for the channels, kludgey knob-sharing for everything else. Random inconsistency. Yuck. 2) Separate knobs for everything. Sounds great - I've always wanted my scope to have a cockpit! 3) Shared knob.