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Buying Scope - Help Me Decide (Tek and Agilent Users Please)

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adamey

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I'm buying a scope shortly, and I've narrowed it down between the TEK MSO3014 and the Agilent MSOX3014A (funny how they both use similar product numbers, but that's a whole other discussion).

**broken link removed**

Agilent MSOX3014A


The Agilent is significantly cheaper (by almost $3,000), and has a faster waveform capture rate. The TEK has more sampling memory (5M vs 4M points). Both have add-ons for doing work with CAN/LIN and other serial buses (which is one thing I want). Agilent claims to have hardware decoding of serial buses while TEK is supposedly software based and Agilent says this makes their scope perform better.

The Agilent sounds like a sure-thing to me based on its features and price, but I'm wondering if there's a reason it's so much cheaper than the TEK (the old saying, you get what you pay for). TEK has a sale on now where I can get 10% off and a free CAN/LIN module which saves money, but still puts me over $1,000 more than the Agilent.


I'd really appreciate if anyone who has any experience with TEK and Agilent higher end scope could shed some light on them and why the TEK is more money (that much better, or just paying for the name).
 
I think the Agilent will maintain its waveform update rate under all conditions whereas the competition won't.

See page 7 of the 6000 series data sheet:
MSO6014A Mixed Signal Oscilloscope: 100 MHz, 4 scope and 16 digital channels | Agilent

for discussion of this. Further, the waveform update rate for the 3000X is 10 times what it is for the 6000 series, which was already quite good; I want one!

The Agilent will give you a 4 Gs/sec sample rate when only 2 channels are enabled.

I think the reason the Agilent is less expensive is that they have further leveraged their proprietary ASIC to do it all.

The 100 MHz scope can actually become a 500 MHz scope just by buying a license for the extra bandwidth. The hardware is already there; you just pay them more money and they'll turn it on for you. The fact that they can give the 500 MHz hardware in a 100 MHz scope for the price of a 100 MHz scope tells you just much they have been able to lower the cost of that hardware.
 
^ Thank you. I'm strongly leaning to the Agilent - nice to hear an opinion as to why they are less money.
 
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