Had a chance to play with the replacement meter last night and this morning. Came with 11r1 FW, updated it to 15r1 first thing. Initial impressions are quite good, but I wish I could adjust the display contrast some. Mine seems too bright and the black background is a bit washed out and grayish. Good visibility at side viewing angles however.
Some other initial thoughts;
- The bar-graph is too slow and slows down the display readout when active, so this function is not really useful as is. I like really fast bar meters to emulate an analog needle.
- The fast/med/slow display rate is about perfect for me with the 15R1 FW (as long as the bar-graph is disabled, see above)
- The Ethernet icon should disappear if your disable the LAN in the I/O settings.
- Love the trend chart and histogram, will need to play this this more today.
- Very good overall feel/look, great buttons. Intuitive layout and UI (Agilent did a good job here).
- DC accuracy is good, well within spec but reads ever so slightly low (~20uV on the 20V scale, or 2 counts out) compared to my voltage ref and Fluke 189 (which agrees with my voltage ref).
AD584LH Ref SDM3055
2.49986 2.4997
5.00151 5.0013
7.50077 7.500[56]
10.00201 10.0018
At 20deg C, meter powered on overnight.
Only had a short time to play with it, will update if I find anything else later. So far I like it.
*** Edit: Update ***
I take back what I said about the washed out and grayish display, turns out its not due to too much brightness or lack of contrast. On the standard numeric display, the background is a dark gray and not black. On the trend chart the background is black and you can see the dark gray bordering the trend chart box.
The slight error in DC accuracy was due to the temperature drift in my reference. I played with cooling and warming the reference and can see the drift plain as day on the trend chart. Once at the cal temp, the meter is spot on.
I have not tested the continuity speed on older FW, but on 15R1 the continuity beep is very fast. I suspect the continuity speed was also improved with the display speed on the new FW.