Which scope manufacturer provides the best user experience?

[TimNJ]

Hi all,

I'm on the market for a fairly inexpensive ($1k or less) scope. The current Rigol DS1054Z promotion at $350USD is almost irresistible, but after using a DS1104Z at work for a couple of months, I'm pretty turned off to buying a Rigol for myself. The on-screen UI feels cluttered, as does the layout of the front panel. And it's not the most responsive. I find myself getting frustrated trying to dial in the right settings.

Based on my experiences with a couple different scopes, I've been trying to determine how important having a good UI/UX is and how much I'm willing to pay for that. For example, Rohde & Schwarz scopes tend to have really polished UIs, but they are way more expensive. They do have a <$1k line (RTC1000) but technically speaking, a poor value. However, from a usability perspective, maybe it's really good? And maybe that's almost as important?

Which scopes do you think are the easiest, or rather least frustrating, to use?

[james_s]

If you ask a bunch of different people, you're likely to get as many responses as there are brands of scope. I like the Tektronix UI myself but that's very likely because it's what I'm most familiar with.

[TimNJ]

If you ask a bunch of different people, you're likely to get as many responses as there are brands of scope. I like the Tektronix UI myself but that's very likely because it's what I'm most familiar with.

This is true. Just curious if there were any general "themes" regarding usability. Visually, the Tek UI looks pretty antiquated, but that doesn't really bother me. They feel reasonably well thought out and responsive, in my opinion.

[nctnico]

In that price range I like the GW Instek because it has buttons horizontally and vertically. This means you don't have to dive into sub-menus. It also has sensible preset buttons. Another option is the touch-screen only MicSig tBook 1000 series. The user interface on the MicSig tBook has been designed for touch screen from the beginning so it works very well (unlike the touchscreen interfaces which where added as an afterthought and basically replace a mouse). A good touchscreen interface does more than a thousand buttons so to say.

[james_s]

Personally I hate touchscreens, I tolerate it on my phone because there's no room for a keyboard but I find most of them frequently fail to register my touches, and the fatal flaw that they get covered in fingerprints. That's a matter of personal preference though.

[nctnico]

I think you should reconsider touch screens. Just look at how babies and small children touch everything they see. A touch screen is a very natural way to operate a piece of equipment. Buttons and knobs are just crutches. I  BTW fingerprints aren't a problem at all (unless you are eating too much chocolate).

[TimNJ]

In that price range I like the GW Instek because it has buttons horizontally and vertically. This means you don't have to dive into sub-menus. It also has sensible preset buttons. Another option is the touch-screen only MicSig tBook 1000 series. The user interface on the MicSig tBook has been designed for touch screen from the beginning so it works very well (unlike the touchscreen interfaces which where added as an afterthought and basically replace a mouse). A good touchscreen interface does more than a thousand buttons so to say.

I've had a GWInstek GDS-2074E in my cart for about a week now. Too chicken to pull the trigger on it. In terms of user interface, it looks pretty good to me. Big reason I'm considering it. On the other hand, it is 3x price of Rigol. But, I feel that it is also just a better scope, when you look past the basic standard specs.

I forgot about Micsig. Gave 'em a look for the last hour or so. Implementation looks decent but not enough to make me consider it. I think the tactile feel is pretty important in the lab. However, if they got close to the level of Rohde & Schwarz RTB2000 or Tektronix 5 series MSO, then I might change my mind.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

[james_s]

I think you should reconsider touch screens. Just look at how babies and small children touch everything they see. A touch screen is a very natural way to operate a piece of equipment. Buttons and knobs are just crutches. I  BTW fingerprints aren't a problem at all (unless you are eating too much chocolate).

It's not as if I've never used one, I use touchscreens every day, I have for many years, they're everywhere and virtually impossible to avoid. I've never liked them for the reasons I mention and I don't think that's likely to change, I'm not a baby or small child nor will I ever be again. As I said it's a matter of personal preference and my preference is strongly in favor of physical buttons and knobs. You are free to prefer touchscreens, that's fine, I won't judge you for it so long as you don't judge me for mine.

Even freshly washed hands leave fingerprints and smudges, our skin produces its own oil, no chocolate required. Perhaps you don't notice them but if you can devise a way to prevent them from appearing on touchscreens you could become rich. I'm one of those fastidious people who cannot stand the feel of having sticky/dirty hands so I was frequently and still I need to wipe the prints off my smartphone frequently.

[jjoonathan]

Whereas I like touch screens quite a bit. I like the interface on my micsig more than I ever liked the interface of my rigol, even though the killer feature is the battery that lets me take it away from the bench. If I wedge my arm in the kickstand I can "hold" it and still have two hands free 

[nanofrog]

I've had a GWInstek GDS-2074E in my cart for about a week now. Too chicken to pull the trigger on it. In terms of user interface, it looks pretty good to me. Big reason I'm considering it. On the other hand, it is 3x price of Rigol. But, I feel that it is also just a better scope, when you look past the basic standard specs.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

I think GW Instek you have in the cart will have the best UI experience between the Asian brands.

FWIW, I own a DS1054Z and I find the sub-menus are a PITA. But that was the compromise I made when I bought it (been a few years).

[tautech]

In that price range I like the GW Instek because it has buttons horizontally and vertically. This means you don't have to dive into sub-menus. It also has sensible preset buttons. Another option is the touch-screen only MicSig tBook 1000 series. The user interface on the MicSig tBook has been designed for touch screen from the beginning so it works very well (unlike the touchscreen interfaces which where added as an afterthought and basically replace a mouse). A good touchscreen interface does more than a thousand buttons so to say.

I've had a GWInstek GDS-2074E in my cart for about a week now. Too chicken to pull the trigger on it. In terms of user interface, it looks pretty good to me. Big reason I'm considering it. On the other hand, it is 3x price of Rigol. But, I feel that it is also just a better scope, when you look past the basic standard specs.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

So it seems you like a clean GUI with only the info you need and a snappier UI than what you've had so far.
The GW and the Siglent X-E's share the same processor and that does deliver a better user experience.

Does shared vertical controls agree with your workflow ?

[TimNJ]

In that price range I like the GW Instek because it has buttons horizontally and vertically. This means you don't have to dive into sub-menus. It also has sensible preset buttons. Another option is the touch-screen only MicSig tBook 1000 series. The user interface on the MicSig tBook has been designed for touch screen from the beginning so it works very well (unlike the touchscreen interfaces which where added as an afterthought and basically replace a mouse). A good touchscreen interface does more than a thousand buttons so to say.

I've had a GWInstek GDS-2074E in my cart for about a week now. Too chicken to pull the trigger on it. In terms of user interface, it looks pretty good to me. Big reason I'm considering it. On the other hand, it is 3x price of Rigol. But, I feel that it is also just a better scope, when you look past the basic standard specs.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

So it seems you like a clean GUI with only the info you need and a snappier UI than what you've had so far.
The GW and the Siglent X-E's share the same processor and that does deliver a better user experience.

Does shared vertical controls agree with your workflow ?

Yeah that sounds about right! I don't think shared vertical controls is really a problem at all, as long as it makes sense.

Siglent SDS1000X-E does look pretty good now that I look at it...especially at $500USD.

[tautech]

In that price range I like the GW Instek because it has buttons horizontally and vertically. This means you don't have to dive into sub-menus. It also has sensible preset buttons. Another option is the touch-screen only MicSig tBook 1000 series. The user interface on the MicSig tBook has been designed for touch screen from the beginning so it works very well (unlike the touchscreen interfaces which where added as an afterthought and basically replace a mouse). A good touchscreen interface does more than a thousand buttons so to say.

I've had a GWInstek GDS-2074E in my cart for about a week now. Too chicken to pull the trigger on it. In terms of user interface, it looks pretty good to me. Big reason I'm considering it. On the other hand, it is 3x price of Rigol. But, I feel that it is also just a better scope, when you look past the basic standard specs.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

So it seems you like a clean GUI with only the info you need and a snappier UI than what you've had so far.
The GW and the Siglent X-E's share the same processor and that does deliver a better user experience.

Does shared vertical controls agree with your workflow ?

Yeah that sounds about right! I don't think shared vertical controls is really a problem at all, as long as it makes sense.

Siglent SDS1000X-E does look pretty good now that I look at it...especially at $500USD.

Yes, SDS1104X-E is a sharp little DSO and it seems in your case shouldn't be overlooked.
Probably the best thread about them is the review by Performa01 where he's gone into them in great detail and there's more info in another thread by rf-loop.
Happy hunting. 

[tggzzz]

A touch screen is a very natural way to operate a piece of equipment.

... with significant disadvantages both in a car and on instruments.

In both cases you have to look at and concentrate on the screen, to make sure your fingers are in the right place and moving "correctly".
With cars, you should be looking out the windscreen.
With scopes, you probably want to watch as you hold/move probes on the UUT, and to look at the waveform when twiddling the timebase etc.

[JPortici]

I think you should reconsider touch screens. Just look at how babies and small children touch everything they see. A touch screen is a very natural way to operate a piece of equipment. Buttons and knobs are just crutches. I  BTW fingerprints aren't a problem at all (unless you are eating too much chocolate).

True dat.
I may be from the younger(-ish?) generation, but one of the best user experiences i had on scopes was from the keysight DSOX-3000T.
I almost felt at home using that scope, every function, on screen and menu based, was discovered naturally while trying to do things as i expected them to be.

I have also experienced the whole transition of touch screens from resisitive touch, to the first iphones, to the first android pieces of shit to the perfectly capable devices that are the cheap (~150€) smartphones we have today.

[james_s]

A touch screen is a very natural way to operate a piece of equipment.

... with significant disadvantages both in a car and on instruments.

In both cases you have to look at and concentrate on the screen, to make sure your fingers are in the right place and moving "correctly".
With cars, you should be looking out the windscreen.
With scopes, you probably want to watch as you hold/move probes on the UUT, and to look at the waveform when twiddling the timebase etc.

I could tolerate it on a scope if it were well done, still not as nice to me as real knobs and switches but whatever, not a big deal.

In a car a touchscreen is absolutely terrible. Condensation and gloves cause issues, and the biggest problem  is I can't operate one without looking at it. In a car I want tactile switches, buttons and sliders that I can operate purely by feel without taking my eyes off the road. I cannot imagine what someone was thinking burying functions in nested menus but whatever, that's off topic.

[nctnico]

A touch screen is a very natural way to operate a piece of equipment.

... with significant disadvantages both in a car and on instruments.

In both cases you have to look at and concentrate on the screen, to make sure your fingers are in the right place and moving "correctly".
With cars, you should be looking out the windscreen.
With scopes, you probably want to watch as you hold/move probes on the UUT, and to look at the waveform when twiddling the timebase etc.

The subject is obviously test equipment... not cars. Where your reasoning goes wrong is that the timebase knob is outside the field of focus of your eyes but the touchscreen isn't.

[bugi]

Where your reasoning goes wrong is that the timebase knob is outside the field of focus of your eyes but the touchscreen isn't.

Well, with the practical experience of trying to do adjustments on a touchscreen control while looking at that same touchscreen for the results (on a mobile phone and couple large tablets), I can say that a physical control devices win 10-0. Either the touchscreen control is still far enough away from what is being looked (even few cm is enough), or it is too close and hand/fingers cover the thing being looked.  This could of course be something that might be learned over time, but so far, few hours on touchscreen and I was still just as annoyed with the experience, vs. keyboard and mouse combo for the same was easy (but of course, been exercising mouse usage for 25years). Or using a knob on a scope was intuitive and easy after less than a minute of learning the sensitivity.

For that kind of activities, it is currently not even a contest.

Once the knob is between fingers, one typically does not have to look at the knob to make adjustments, but making changes on a touchscreen control will sooner or later end up with finger slipping off the control (and in worst case, on top of another control, messing things totally up). There are modern somewhat helpful software tweaks for that problem, though, but to expect the electronics/measurement industry to bother with them (yet) is quite the daydream, considering at how crappy level they still are (compared to e.g. the best experiences on mobile apps or PC software that have actually bothered to work properly on the usability), even on the expensive ones.  I guess it comes from the development cost distribution; when hardware development is so expensive, there isn't that much left for software, whereas mobile/PC software devs can put everything on just that software.


However, for actions like menu handling or selecting parameters from a list, a touchscreen is much more convenient, even without any touch feedback (as long as the visual response is "instant").

So, I'm fully expecting touchscreen scopes to become more common over time (considering that the touch layer is quite cheap thing these days), and hopefully softwares gets developed so that one can choose (on that same scope) whether to touch the screen or buttons/knobs, whichever happens to be more natural for the user and action.

[tggzzz]

A touch screen is a very natural way to operate a piece of equipment.

... with significant disadvantages both in a car and on instruments.

In both cases you have to look at and concentrate on the screen, to make sure your fingers are in the right place and moving "correctly".
With cars, you should be looking out the windscreen.
With scopes, you probably want to watch as you hold/move probes on the UUT, and to look at the waveform when twiddling the timebase etc.

The subject is obviously test equipment... not cars. Where your reasoning goes wrong is that the timebase knob is outside the field of focus of your eyes but the touchscreen isn't.

The problem manifest in cars is equally true with test equipment - and anything else where you need to adjust a control while simultaneously observing the effects.

Focus is a second-order issue.

More important is the surprisingly small area where we can hope to get 20/20 vision - the fovea centralis. This subtends a "massive" 5 degrees[1] of vision field. At arms length that translates to a 5cm diameter. Hence if you are looking at the touch control, you simply cannot be simultaneously looking at fine details in the trace.

That's not a problem with conventional controls - you don't need to look at your fingers when they twist a control.

[1] 5 degrees is a generous figure. FFI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea_centralis

[TimNJ]

If you are after a fast scope without the bells and whistles, consider Keysight 1000 series. Hack the unit to 100MHz (and guaranteed to lose warranty since it's a hardware hack) if you outgrow 50MHz, but for a general purpose home lab, 50MHz should be good.

I think Keysight 1000 is a solid entry level scope, and a good effort compared to the garbage Tek has to offer, but overall not the best value.

I’d expect two channels to be enough most of the time, but undoubtedly there will be times where 3 or 4 will come in handy. What does the Keysight have to offer that would make it a more attractive product compared to say, Siglent SDS1000X-E? Better firmware?

[TimNJ]

In that price range I like the GW Instek because it has buttons horizontally and vertically. This means you don't have to dive into sub-menus. It also has sensible preset buttons. Another option is the touch-screen only MicSig tBook 1000 series. The user interface on the MicSig tBook has been designed for touch screen from the beginning so it works very well (unlike the touchscreen interfaces which where added as an afterthought and basically replace a mouse). A good touchscreen interface does more than a thousand buttons so to say.

I've had a GWInstek GDS-2074E in my cart for about a week now. Too chicken to pull the trigger on it. In terms of user interface, it looks pretty good to me. Big reason I'm considering it. On the other hand, it is 3x price of Rigol. But, I feel that it is also just a better scope, when you look past the basic standard specs.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

So it seems you like a clean GUI with only the info you need and a snappier UI than what you've had so far.
The GW and the Siglent X-E's share the same processor and that does deliver a better user experience.

Does shared vertical controls agree with your workflow ?

Yeah that sounds about right! I don't think shared vertical controls is really a problem at all, as long as it makes sense.

Siglent SDS1000X-E does look pretty good now that I look at it...especially at $500USD.

Yes, SDS1104X-E is a sharp little DSO and it seems in your case shouldn't be overlooked.
Probably the best thread about them is the review by Performa01 where he's gone into them in great detail and there's more info in another thread by rf-loop.
Happy hunting. 

Thanks for the suggestion. I’m going to do an in depth comparison between GWInstek GDS-2000E and Siglent SDS1000X-E. They seem very similar at first glance, in terms of general specifications. I’d like to figure out if theres any reason the GWInstek is over double the price of the Siglent.

I do feel that the GWInstek might have more solid/mature firmware at this point but that’s only a speculation.

[Fungus]

Siglent doesn't seem to have the best user interface, as noted here:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/siglent-sds1204x-e-released-for-domestic-markets-in-china/msg1526209/#msg1526209

Basic things like turning on a measurement for a channel require you to go into a big text menu and select items from it using a twisty knob.

That's not a good UI paradigm.

[nctnico]

I do feel that the GWInstek might have more solid/mature firmware at this point but that’s only a speculation.

It is not speculation. GW Instek has better polished firmware and does better testing before releasing firmware. The GW Instek just works as advertised. Also the GW Instek has a seperate select button which is way better compared to a push & rotate button in one you find on many scopes.

[Bob Sava]

Personally I don't like Siglent's UI - not for how much time it takes to make a selection - but for inconsistencies on how GUI operates (cursors vs gated for example) and *most importantly* lack of indicators (feedback) on what features are currently on.  On the other hand, Siglent has hardware specs of scopes 2x price. 

When considering GW Instek keep in mind that they only have 10M memory which puts them behind Siglent and Rigol.

[tautech]

Thanks for the suggestion. I’m going to do an in depth comparison between GWInstek GDS-2000E and Siglent SDS1000X-E. They seem very similar at first glance, in terms of general specifications. I’d like to figure out if theres any reason the GWInstek is over double the price of the Siglent.

Did you overlook the GW has a bigger display and twice the sampling rate ?
Both these features are also available in the SDS2000X series models at comparable additional cost.

What you have to work with on the display is very important to some but each user has a different tolerance for clutter and information overload. Proficient scope users don't need their screen cluttered in measurements excepting for advanced measurements.

I quickly cobbled this screenshot together in an order to show how Siglent keep their display as tidy as possible and even with all the stuff actuated there's good use of what otherwise just looks like vacant space.