I also found myself laughing at the Agilent sample rates being touted as "industry leading" "groundbreaking" "unheard of price to performance" etc etc etc etc.....and by that token, found myself rolling on the ground howling when Tek markets the MDO by the same merits.....
Indeed. I guess the only "industry leading" thing from them is the amount of BS in their marketing stuff.
One thing I will give Agilent over LeCroy though....they don't dick around when it comes to processing performance.....they make easily the most responsive scopes I have ever put my hands on....LeCroy might have gotten better at this, as the computing power in their devices has gone up, but it's still offloaded to a general purpose microprocessor and OS.....and obviously Tek is off in some bubble of another universe when they think their products are competitive (in that regard)
Agilent seems to have a nice way of packaging their equipment into very very nice Ui's....fast to respond, truly excellent layouts....logical hierarchies etc etc....but then when it comes down to the "real" specs....it the same old repackaged chips, from 2 generations ago....which admitedly LeCroy is doing as well....however their chips from "2 generations ago" still seem to offer "more"....
I have to disagree here a little bit. It's true that Agilents scopes are very responsive, but the same is true for newer LeCroy scopes as well. A DSOX2k/3k is a very responsive scope (don't forget that these are relatively simple scopes using some closed down version of Windows CE), but the same is true for the WaveSurfer 3000 (LeCroy's equivalent of the DSOX3k(T) which is also a closed down Windows Embedded based scope) which is similarly responsive. Newer LeCroy's scopes (X-Stream II using PCIe) that run a full version of Windows are as much responsive as their Agilent/Keysight counterparts.
No argument about Tek who seems to be stuck in the past.
Older LeCroy Windows scopes (X-Stream I scopes which are based on 32bit PCI) like your WRXi could often feel a bit laggy as they were pretty much underpowered, simply because LeCroy cut some corners on CPUs (slow Celerons with small caches, resulting in the CPU getting maxed out regularly) and RAM (which is a bit ridiculous, considering the low prices of better CPUs and the high price tags of these scopes). But these problems can be overcome by simple upgrades. On my WR64Xi, general responsiveness improved noticably after I upgraded from the slow Celeron 1.3Ghz/512k to a Pentium-M 1.8GHz/2MB, the RAM to 1GB (max for that scope) and the painfully slow 4200rpm IDE drive to a modern SATA 5400rpm hard drive (installing updated drivers for chipset, gfx etc helped, too). On my WavePro 7300A (which already came with the LeCroy upgraded processor, a P4 2.53GHz with 512k cache and 533MHz FSB, as well as 2GB RAM), changing the processor to a P4 3.2GHz (1MB cache, 800MHz FSB), upgrading the RAM to 3GB and replacing the old IDE hard drive with a fast intel SATA SSD320, the scope went from laggy to instantaneous reaction to inputs. It's now easily as responsive as the Agilent DSO9k and 90k scopes I use at work.
As to Agilent's UI, I agree for their entry level scopes (i.e. DSOX2k/3k) which do have a nice UI, but as to their desktop Windows based scopes I think the UI isn't great. Yes, they have touch, but it still is pretty obvious that the whole thing was originally designed with mouse control in mind, not with touch, and that it's all based on the mouse UI of the old Infiniium 54800 Series running Windows95 (which wasn't exactly a stellar example of great UI design). Recent scopes gave the UI a bit of an overhaul, but the main flaws remain.
Agilent scopes do have a pretty simple front panel layout, though, and usually come with individual vertical controls for each channel. Aside from the WR6k(A), WP7k(A) and WM8k(A) LeCroy still has a single vertical control for all channels, and while the general layout of most LeCroy scopes is pretty similar across all products (aside WaveAce/WaveJet and WS3k), things like the SUperKnob on the WR6zi/HDO can be confusing to users unfamiliar with that scope.
How important individual vertical controls are is certainly a thing of individual preference. I enjoy the individual knobs on my WP7kA, but the single control on other LeCroy scopes never bothered me (but then I also liked the single knob front panel of the early HP 54500 Series).
It's very difficult to wade through the bullshit in new scopes and other t&m gear.....makes you just want to buy something that is already "obsolete" but still does exactly what you NEED, and have a good chuckle over the marketing BS some of these companies use to keep the consumer engine running.....
Agreed. Not that this is a bad option, though, as buying older gear (especially if it's still supported) can actually save you a lot of money, and in some cases (i.e. Rigol and Siglent scopes) leave the beta testing to someone else.