I got a few 71xx and 72xx a few SDA and DDA (special version of sda with addons for harddisk dda = disk drive analyser) as wel as wavesurfers (rebadged iwatsu) and some 7zi's.
We only use em to capture long events due to their deep memory. Everyone in the lab curses and swears at those machines. They have tremendous dead times, are loud, noisy(signal wise), forever caught in 'calibrating' (because their a/d converters suck. Change a few degrees and they go nuts) and he software is buggy and crashes. Spin the timebase knob too fast and the scope bluescreens.(the win2k based machines)
The 7zi is made from crappy plastic that splits over time. Whenever i move it i have to backtrack to pick up all the knobs that have fallen off. Whatever moron came up with the idea of having a removable frontpanel that could be connected using a usb cable should be fired and banned from ever designing anything, electronic or other. There is so much play and the panel fits so bad it breaks contact with the mating connector. So you push abutton or jiggle a knob and the scope goes pling-ploing, ploing-pling (usb disconnect, usb reconnect).
Processing is done on the built in pc . This makes the scope slow as molasses. Plus the pc fan kicks in full power. It's like sitting next to a damn vacuum cleaner.
Another gripe : Lecroy still has not figured out, after all these years, how to properly handle a rotary encoder. It goes from slow as snail scrolling to lightspeed in 2 clicks. Ever heard of a proportional speed algorithm ? Navigation (scrolling) is a pain. You want to move the trace a bit so you go slow.. Get frustrated that it crawls along at 1/10 division per click so you start turning a bit faster and all of a sudden you passed 10 screens.... There is no speed inbetween..
And some of the machines are bloody liars. I had their digital option module with 32 inputs. We dont use it anymore because we dont trust it. I have a 15 page report i wrote a few years ago with all the bugs in that horror. Turn of a channel, turn back on : data lost or corrupted. Zoom an area and the scope shows a completely different area. It took em 2 months to come back to me stating they could not reproduce the problem, so i spent 4 hours on the phone walking them through it step by strep. All that was needed was hook up the scope to its own calibrator output. Oopsie, yes, you are right.. It shouldn't do that... Oopsie, shouldn't do that either... Oopsie that's not right either...
Another two months later they had the audacity to send me a beta release with the comment : please install and verify of this one fixes the problems. Let us know if there is something that still doesnt work... It's a 50.000$ scope and i have to debug it for them ? Bugger off ! I took a black marker , changed the o to an a and the y to a p in their company name and shipped it back.
In short : i only use them when i need something very specific like long capture. For anything else i hate these machines. They are unusable both from a behavorial perpective, functional perspective and user interface perspective. I want /need a scope wher, when you click a button or rotate a dial the response is instantaneous. A scope that can keep time lock between stored and live data. A scope that behaves like a 54645D , that machine is 30 years old, runs on a 16MHz motorola 68k and response is like an analog machine. Click it and bang it's there. The 7zi is a quad core q6600 and it scrolls slower than my grandma in her walker.
Oh, and the probes are crap too. Flimzy pogo pin tips that break waaay too easy , overpriced rebadged hioki current probes and super noisy differential probes that can only do a few volts common mode