USB scope are quite ok, but are always expensive compared to cheap chinese scope (rigol, owon).
I have a DSO5200, quite nice but suffers from inferior software and customer service, and also a nasty timebase bug (one timebase is false: 320ns/div instead of 400ns).
The rigol scope (DS1052) is pretty small (its screen also).
Unfortunately all the Chinese E-Bay resellers of Rigol have been cut off. I guess Rigol has tried to cut off the grey market to appease their local resellers. You used to be able to get the DS1052 at $375 shipped from China.
The cheaper PicoScopes have a very nice computer interface and great resolution, their only downside is their limited sampling speed. Great for low speed analog circuits, but suffers for many modern digital designs.
The Rigol series of bench scopes are the next best thing on the price scale. Agilent rebrands them as their own low end scope (and doubles the price in the process).
Once you get into the $1k+ area, the Tek scopes are a great deal - more polished than the Rigol.
Go to a ham radio swap meet, you can get a Tek for < $100, or wait for a local business to buy new equipment and ask if you can take the eWaste pallet (which is probably where most of them at the ham radio swap meets come from anyways)
I started with a 2MHz analogue bandwidth handheld scope and that didn’t become limiting until SPI and a few other things. Now I have the 25Mhz pico I don’t find any limits yet, but I always see people mentioning their “low” bandwidth and I always wonder, what exactly do you guys use the scopes for that require much faster bandwidth? I guess I’m not that far ahead yet as I’m relatively new to electronics and would be interesting to see the common use of say 100Mhz bandwidth on a scope and for what purpose.
I need to measure a 40MHz square wave coming off of a bit-banged I/O pin on a UBW32 (80Mhz PIC32 CPU). I need to see if there is ringing on the square wave. I need at least a 100Mhz if not faster scope. Stuff like that.
Or how about the SPI ports on micros nowdays - they talk at up to 40MHz to SD cards and such.
Ah ye I suppose. I have yet to find any need for a fast PIC chip, 4 and 8Mhz 8-bit have done me so far for anything from motors, wireless cameras, sensors, USB etc… I keep wanting to play with some 32-bit 80Mhz chips but can’t think of anything useful to do with their speed.
Thanks for the input everyone. Those Owon and Rigol scopes look pretty promising for the price.
I was originally pretty tempted by the DSO-2090 just because it seemed so inexpensive, but to get an actual scope for now much more might make more sense.
I have to admit, the non-TFT LCD is not a big deal for me. Just adjust the contrast and its fine (any one who had a laptop in the early-mid 90’s knows what that is like). The scope works just fine for me on my bench. I routinely grab images from it via USB and these are in color as well, which is nice.
I was dead set on a Rigol for a long time and was saving my pennies for it, until I saw this Owon and read a few good reviews. I decided at that price, it was worth the try and it was.
Yah, I got the Rigol DS1052 when they were selling them for $375. It’s awesome -way more scope than I expected for that price. Yes, I wish it were faster. But the whole usb interface to the PC thing is really, really nice. Lots of great measurements, easy to use controls. Even at the $500 price I would recommend it as a first scope.
For pure digital work, I prefer to use my zeroplus logic analyser. Great for decoding purpose and 100MHz internal clock with 32k trace for the lower end. That’s also the reason why I use an usb scope, I already have a dedicated laptop* for the logic analyser.
EmbeddedMan:
Yah, I got the Rigol DS1052 when they were selling them for $375. It’s awesome -way more scope than I expected for that price. Yes, I wish it were faster. But the whole usb interface to the PC thing is really, really nice. Lots of great measurements, easy to use controls. Even at the $500 price I would recommend it as a first scope.
I just ordered a Rigol DS1052 from DealExtreme for $405 shipped. Looking forward to comparing it to my Owon.
For an amateur who does not have any cro yet - might be ok. For a bit advanced use - no.
It has some nice features for signal measuring , triggering etc but its cons are pretty strong:
its display resolution is shockingly low (I missed it when reading reviews before I bought it; my mistake!) : ONLY 64K TFT LCD: this alone kills this cro;
very low scanning rate at time base near 10ms : scans once per 1.7 sec only !!!, for TB=5ms scans once per 400ms ! And the scan rate is not properly dependant on TB: eg. for TB=50ms it is = ~ 600ms i.e. FASTER than for TB=20 ms. This makes TB=20ms almost useless for waveforms that change faster than 10x20ms = 200ms. Other ranges in general have also too slow scan rate; to the point that after a while your eyes get tired from watching the dodgy refreshes
there are 2 cursors available (std and OK feature) but ONLY one knob to control them, therefore you have to keep changing which cursor you will move by pressing TWO buttons first and then adjusting the knob.
I had to buy something (my old cro went bust) and I bought it (after reading some reviews) and it appears that this purchase was a mistake - I will be reselling it soon and buying something better.
I do not expect DSO in the 500/1000$ range to perform like the Agilent MSO6054 I have on my work desk.
It appears there is a new interesting DSO, the Hantek/Tekway DST1102B, quite similar to Rigol but with better display (who can make a worse display anyway?).
(which is probably where most of them at the ham radio swap meets come from anyways)