SDS2104X Plus arrived yesterday, here's my first impressions: (note that I didn't have any real standalone oscilloscope before, so I'm lacking in comparison points with other scopes)
Quite disappointed when first powering up, there's rather loud fan. I didn't expect it to be anywhere that loud.
Not so surprising because I could see that on reviews, but knobs are rather poor. Almost each one feels slightly different, rotating slightly off-center. I'm not really sure if there's some velocity control algorithm, but the effect is the faster you turn the knob... the slower it changes value. It would be infuriating to use but touchscreen rescues it, so you can at least click/drag/enter value instead of fiddling with these non-indented knobs. (indented H/V coarse knobs work OK)
Changing timebase and vertical scale is reasonably responsive (it's not totally immediate, but it's fine). For some reason waveform updating stops when changing H/V offsets, but I guess this is intentional? (I don't really get why changing offset register would require stopping waveform)
There's only Normal and Peak acquisition modes, no Eres or Average. (these are in Math, but more on that later)
Of course there is no zoom-out capability at the cost of History feature. Which is not necessarily bad, but they really should add configurable setting like 'capture X% outside screen area' to split memory between zoom-out area and history captures to get best of both worlds.
Note that AWG in datasheet is "up to 50MHz", but this is only for sine, square is limited to
5MHz10MHz.
Not tested extensively but Bode plot seems to work. Feels slow but I don't have any other instrument to compare to. UI during Bode operation is nearly unresponsive, so not possible to change display settings when it is doing its thing.
There are few Chinese-type software quirks, but nothing really annoying. (like, what's easiest way to lock up scope? Press Touch button and then Auto Setup ...) (or, it already struggles with fillrate on drawing UI on that screen, but open/close for side menu is animated.. WHY)
And going to Math functions, they are just.. slow. Really slow. It's performance is directly dependent on configured memory depth, and I'm not quite sure why (this thing have 1024px wide screen, not HD by any stretch, so why it keeps processing over whole capture memory, only to throw it away for display on this lowres screen?) At higher memory depths it takes multiple seconds to just do single update of simplest functions (like channel subtraction).
Missed big opportunity with mouse support, measure tool with mouse rectangle selection would be great. (you just have to grab measure lines individually and drag it, and it sucks if you accidentally grab waveform instead).
Does anyone had success with using USB WiFi dongles with it? Poking around filesystem I only found driver for rtl8188eu, so I ordered dongle with that chip and I'll see how it goes. Configuring wpa_supplicant manually will work for sure, but maybe there is a way to activate configuration GUI from other Siglent scopes that officially supports wifi?
I can't really recommend it as gaming scope, as it's only achieves around 3fps in Doom.
(this partially explains poor Math performance, and also good performance of normal waveform display, as you can see it is overlaid on screen and completely bypasses scope operating system)
Not necessarily related to this scope, but some comment: I don't get why these entry-level (but not cheapest) scopes don't have proper GPU included. There really isn't Zynq-like chip with Mali GPU? Or even they could slap some cheap mass-produced mobile SoC and link it up with FPGA with PCIe/USB3. Give it a HD screen, proper hardware accelerated UI that gets stable 60fps, maybe even offload all these Math features to compute shaders. But no, we instead end up getting CPU-blitted UI, so that leads to lowres screens, and any feature that have to be fast is hacked around by directly overlaying waveform from FPGA onto screen.
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