I’ve been lately searching for an entry level digital sampling oscilloscope (DSO) around the 400€ price tag. Having exhaustively read through the various forums and watched the numerous product reviews on YouTube, it became pretty clear that there are currently two major candidates on the market that fulfil the current price tag and provide a decent feature set.
- Rigol DS1054Z
- Siglent SDS1202X-E
Most of the product reviews that I have come across were clearly biased towards the one or the other device. Thus, I have ordered and tested both devices whose specs and reviews are widely available on the web. I have created the following decision matrix that I would like to share with you, hoping to provide you with a more objective opinion about the two great devices from an electronics hobbyist’s point of view.
The Decision Matrix
Following is the decision matrix that i have used in order to come to a final decision on the device i should keep.
Important: Please bear in mind that the resulting score largely depends on your individual preferences and is by no means an absolute verdict over the goodness of the particular device. Thus, applying different grades and using different priorities might lead to a completely different outcome.
Following is the Excel table that i have used for the generating the above snapshot:
I have only considered the features that I found relevant for my personal use. The features have been prioritized from 1 to 4, whereas 1 has the highest priority.
Each device has been assigned a grade for each of the listed features as follows:
- Grade 1: feature has exceeded my expectations
- Grade 0: feature is on par with my expectations
- Grade -1: feature is worse than I had expected
The feature score has been calculated according to the following formula:
The total score being the the sum of the individual feature scores.
Please free to distribute and use the above table for your own purposes. I do hope that you do find this information useful.