Hello all
I know this is an old thread. But based on Paul's recommendation I bought a Rigol 1074 a year ago.
It offers a lot of functionality for the price compared with other more expensive brands (like Tektronix).
But I have to advice clearly that chinese oscilloscopes have a far worse quality than I was used to.
All my life I used a Hameg and it was really high quality - although analog. And it lived nearly 30 years.
My old scope (bought in 1990's) served me decades but it was lacking memory from the first day.
And as in today's digital era it is indispensable to capture a signal to memory for studying it, I bought a Rigol 1074.
At first look it is a fine oscilloscope.
But when you work with it you find the flaws.
Mine has several bugs.
Most of them are difficult to reproduce.
One thing that does not work at all is the knob "horizontal position".
When you move this knob, the captured signal moves on the screen from the left to the right.
A very basic functionality - you might think.
But in Rigol it is not working correctly.
If you move the knob too fast you suddenly loose the signal which you were watching and it jumps to a COMPLETELY different location in the signal.
When you move the knob slowly the signal nearly does not move at all on the screen.
This knob is simply a shame.
It also happened to me that suddenly it showed random data instead of the data which it showed before.
Just moving this knob too fast it lost the captured data in memory and showed crippled data generated by a software bug in the oscilloscope.
Short to say: Such a simple functionalty as "navigating in the captured signal" is working very badly.
But this week I found an additional and incredible bug in my scope:
In one position of the horizontal frequency my oscilloscope shows the wrong timing!
All timing is exactly 4% too slow.
I would never have expected this because digital scopes have a precise crystal based timing.
4% deviation in timing is a very severe error for a measurement device.
It means that you cannot trust in what the oscilloscope shows you.
You expect a signal to have a period of 600 ms, but your oscilloscope insists that the period has 624 ms.
This is COMPLETELY wrong and it is a shame for Rigal that they don't have a quality control which detects such servere bugs before selling this series.
Generally I have made worst experience with chinese products in the past years - apart from oscilloscopes.
Have a look here what I write about chinese ELM327 adapters:
https://netcult.ch/elmue/HUD ECU Hacker/#ELM327_Adapter_USB
They are 100% FRAUD.
As I could not believe that I found such a bug and Google shows no results, I posted on StackExchange to ask if someone else made the same experience.
And I was right: Another user confirmed this severe bug: In his Rigol 1054 the same thing happens.
It seems that I'am the first to discover this bug, although it exists since years.
So if you want to buy a Rigol:
Be aware that the price is cheaper than other brands, but what you wil get is cheap chinese quality.
In my experience Rigol offers a good hardware quality but the firmware is buggy.
What does it serve me if I buy an oscilloscope with hundeds of features (like for example a "cursor" which measures the period of a signal) and this functionaliy is showing me completely wrong values?
All my life I trusted in my old Hameg oscilloscope. I trusted it blindly. It never betrayed me.
But today I measure something and I have to ask myself if this is true or false?
I have to make extra tests to verify if my scope shows me the truth or a lie.
The Chinese betray the rest of the world with their cheap crap.
I knew this from Alibaba and AliExpress.
But I would not have expected this from a professional measurement equipment.
Read my post here about the incredible Rigol 1074 bug with all the details:
https://electronics.stackexchange.c...l-ds1074-oscilloscope-shows-very-wrong-timing
Elmü