Here’s another “loaner” from David Menting, this time it’s his scope, the Owon SDS 7102V – which is sales-speak for a dual-channel 100 MHz digital storage oscilloscope:

This unit is available in the Netherlands from EleShop, for € 450 incl VAT, which makes it only marginally more expensive than the ubiquitous Rigol DS1052E with 320×240 display and 50 MHz bandwidth.

This thing is amazingly thin (total size is 7 x 34 x 16 cm), yet packs an 800 x 600 pixel color LCD screen to present a really detailed display (click to see the full size image):

In a way, more is better. But keep in mind that the 8-bit ADC’s typically used in modern “affordable” scopes can only measure 256 different voltage levels full-scale. To really benefit from 512 or more vertical pixels resolution, you either need a 9-bit ADC or some sort of oversampling and averaging. Having said that, I would definitely consider 320×240 as low end nowadays – this screen is a huge improvement, in displaying much finer detail as well as in helping estimate voltage levels at a glance.

Here’s an example of just how much screen real-estate this scope has:

You might recognise the two waveforms above as the 10 MHz and 25 MHz signals generated by my signal generator – same as used in this recent weblog post.

Tomorrow, I’ll show you the front panel and I’ll add some comparative notes…