It depends on how you look at it. If 'it doesn't crash' is a qualifier for mature then you could call it mature. But then again I'm not using my SDS2204 a lot; I have made it my carry-along and backup scope. The points in my earlier review still stand but I have had some correspondence with various people at Siglent on what I think would be very useful improvements. They seem to look at Rigol a lot but I urged them to not look at how Rigol also does things wrong but look at Lecroy, Keysight and Tektronix instead. I hope Siglent is working on a firmware update which hopefully enhances the useability of the SDS2000.
Thanks for the "real-user" report, Nico.
I would agree that simply emulating Rigol is not a good strategy for Siglent (or anybody), and that those you suggested would be greatly superior foundations to take lessons from. The fact that they now have the SDS3000 in-house should be a concrete example to them of how much better things
could be, and provide enhancements that SDS2000 owners would benefit greatly from.
IMO, "not crashing" is an inadequate standard to aspire to. Frankly, with the usability faults it has, I would not be interested even if it
never crashed. And those faults and limitations are totally correctable, in firmware. But that requires resources that Siglent has (so far) been unwilling to commit. It's like you've got this great potential just sitting there (hardware), but it's not getting realized (firmware).
Unfortunately, the impression I'm getting is that Siglent actually DOES consider the SDS2000 to be a "mature product", and doesn't intend to devote additional resources to it.
And that may be because all their top people are hard at work building their next-gen Model in-house DSO (SDS2500?), based on all the enhanced experiences they have seen with the firmware that LeCroy provided for their SDS3000.
Which would be a very sad situation for anyone purchasing an SDS2000, and expecting things to improve. It's always important for engineers to buy what exists right now, and not what is rumored, or assumed (or even promised), for some future update. That's an especially strong recommendation to follow with the SDS2000, since all indications so far are that "what you see is all you will ever get".
If that is enough for some people, then fine. But it certainly would not be enough to satisfy me. Hopefully they do have some surprises up their sleeves (getting back to it after their next DSO is released?), and those will be incorporated into what they eventually send to Dave to review.
I have a pretty good idea what his review would say (based on the current units), but there's no point in my writing it for him here.
Oh heck... why not? Something like,
"It's a decent enough unit, with a few small things done better than Rigol. But unless you REALLY need the 4-channels, there's no compelling reason to buy one over a Rigol." That's just my guess. But it may explain why Dave
still doesn't have one yet, after all this time.