Since many people that doesn't have (or actively use) scope that has Lecroy/Picoscope/Siglent type of memory management are absolutely sure it is evil and unusable, based on prejudice, wild accusations and no real data, here is an example why all this is a BOGUS problem.
Used Pico as example:
A look at 50 ns pulse width (yes that is a zoom factor of 1M (1 milion), without any visible performance impact :
same thing with resizable, floating overview:
This is full size capture, with 200ms worth of data....
What is crippled here, or hard to use or hard to understand ?
How is this HARDER to understand than manually fuffing around with sample lengths, timebases and such?
What is unclear here?
And to answer to Dave's predicament, you never get ANYTHING free.
Either way you need to MANUALLY set scope to capture long capture BEFOREHAND (either by virtue of
fixed sample memory length, or
fixed time length.)
And you
don't want to keep scope in this
ultra long capture setting all the time. It is
practically unusable for normal "scoping around". Not
only because it is "lot of data to process". It is simply that
every capture will last 200ms even without any processing time. While discussing whether 1M WFMs/sec is better than 100k WFMs/sec is a moot point, once we start talking about 4 WFMs/sec it gets unusable for normal use.
So you will go back to
auto memory management or
short sample length for "normal" use. Meaning
every time you want to use "zoom out" you will
need to setup scope memory depth manually and specifically for that and do that
beforehand. So the argument " it is nice to have this for times you didn't plan for it, you just realized something, and than you just zoom out and there it is.." doesn't stand.
It is
always deliberate manual setup,
either way. I
do recognize that
each person
has its own way of thinking, but calling
different way to achieve
same thing "crippling defect" and suggesting that "people should not buy these scopes until this defect is fixed" is very,
very wrong, both
factually, and as a
message..
It just seems
unnecessarily inflammatory..