It's been a long standing implementation of capture strategy by LeCroy, Pico scope and Siglent all of which are respected brands in their respective fields.
It allows more power to the user other than in corner use cases.
AFAIK it's still on a low priority list for Siglent to modify to suit those that can't/won't adapt to a different way of reaching the same result.
Not having a Siglent/LeCroy/Pico, I can't comment on the practicality aspects between Zoom In and Zoom Out, but this latest skirmish highlights Siglent's decision to not change the behaviour of their Mem Depth setting from "Maximum usable memory" to "User set memory" - IMHO a non-catastrophic bug, but still a bug.
No it's a design decision and for good reason and common to all 3 brands.
Any change to current behaviour could impact on specifications optimised by the current design philosophy.
No, it doesn't (and not only on Siglent but also for Lecroy and Picoscope scopes). That is the real kicker! So quit the marketing BS. Nobody is buying it. You can't even explain what the benefit is of this so called 'design choice' is anyway.
The reason I know that there are no downsides to adding 'zoom out' is because I have designed & build oscilloscope (like) data acquisition systems.
Well,
it is a design philosophy, by choice, which
defines architecture. And you cannot know how easy is to add something to already released product, unless it is you who designed it or have privileged knowledge.
And I highly doubt what you designed some time ago was even close to complexity of SDS2000X+. And with that I don't mean you're not smart enough or something like that. Far from it. I simply don't think you had resources to undertake such a project and work on it for years doing nothing else. And with silicone available then. SDS2000X+ is a huge project.
To be honest, I don't know either whether it can be done or not or how "easy" it would be to implement this as an afterthought. Only Siglent does.
But what I do know, that it is not a problem per se. It is simply different way of working, and LeCroy, for instance, shows no intention to change it and customers are fine with it. They address usability the way I already explained to you several times, by having more flexible viewports and zoom windows. If SDS2000X+ would allow for zoom overview window to be shrunk to very small, you wouldn't even know you're in zoom window and would work the same as you do on your RTM3000. On my Picoscope I capture full timebase length by deciding I'm going to capture 200 ms, and then open as many different views I like, looking at different parts of waveform at different zoom settings at the same time. Beauty.. See attachment.
But to be honest, on SDS2000x+, when you enable zoom, what screen is left is still bigger than my whole screen on Keysight 3000T.. So yeah, not such a big deal....
Also, to repeat from before, better is better. If they can improve on this, so people like you can have it their way too, it is going to make it even better. But it is not a showstopper. It simply isn't perfect. Which (being perfect on entry level products) for some reason is not requirement for big brands like Keysight and R&S and LeCroy. They are allowed to make products that are deliberately limited for marketing purposes. With them it is business decisions and "small niggles". With Siglent and Rigol it's "crap I wouldn't buy"...
For instance, on your RTM3000, when you grab your full memory (the way you do it, because it supports that
), what do you do with it? How do you search through 400 MB of SPI or I2C messages?
You don't. Because of a
small niggle that it
doesn't even support that... You save data to the stick and take it to the PC and analyze it in Excel. To me
that is
not a workflow a
cceptable to me.In my opinion, you would have been better off by buying Picoscope 6403E, and grab and analyze it directly on a PC. And what you have is a
9000€ scope when it is on special discount.
Your crusade over this "it works
differently than what I am
used to, so it
must be wrong" is very much unimportant distraction over
more important thing:
Will SDS2000X+ allow you to
do more work and
enable you to do stuff you cannot if you buy similarly priced DSOX1204G ?
Does DSOX1204G have:
- 10" touch screen
- histograms
- histicons
- trend plots
- low noise 500uV/div real hardware sensitivity.
- CAN FD trigger/decode
- 100 MPoints per ch (200 MPoint max interleaved)
- 50 Ohm inputs
- Zone trigering
- all the advance triggering modes
- 2 Mpoint FFT
- Multichannel FRA
- 16 digital channels (paid option, but it is there to be had if MSO is needed)
All of these are real advantages, directly usable every day and in every scenario. All of that makes this SDS20000X+ more like something between R&S RTB2000 and RTM3000, for the price of DSOX1204G...
Apart from this "I would like to use memory differently" niggle, it's a steal... In it's price range it is a king. Together with some compromises, still a price category winner.
And know what, funny thing, people that actually own it and use it have no problems with it. Funny that... Only armchair warriors that don't even own one have problems with it.
I do get it, it is different than what you're used to. And when I first tried ANY piece of equipment it felt weird. MSOX3000T is touted by people here as "best usability, most intuitive, easiest to use". That's crap. It's not. If you're coming from 10 years of using Tektronix, it won't be logical at all.. But few weeks later, after you memorize things by doing it, it feels natural. Same as people, saying, "Picoscope is weird, I cannot use scope on a PC". Yes you can, and it's fine. It's just different. And after you let yourself go of the biases, you realize how
superior is sometimes to Keysight 3000T. for some type of work.
Regards,
Sinisa