Review on Highly Accurate Rigol DS1054Z Digital Oscilloscope with Wide Bandwidth for Precise Measurements by Genene Locson

Great for the price. You won't find a much better new 2016 priced 4 channel digital oscilloscope. There is decent competition from even newer players (like Siglent), maybe with better specs according to the EEVblog, but there are also plenty of bugs and other issues with some of them. I would definitely consider competition, but I feel like Rigol has really established itself as a solid brand. If you've ever used an oscilloscope, I would say that the DS1054Z is actually very intuitive. I watched a few videos online where people first explained all the features (again mostly from EEVblog) and then spent some time doing it themselves and 99% of them are pretty much self-explanatory. The number of buttons and functions was intimidating at first, but it didn't take long to get the hang of it. It's a huge improvement over the slightly cheaper and much older DS1052E in every way. The screen is excellent: it's big, bright, and has a signal intensity setting similar to analog oscilloscopes. The sample rate and storage are pretty high for the price. It can be upgraded to 100MHz, it has many trigger modes, and it has many functions in general. Also, this device is tiny compared to the old analog oscilloscopes I used in school. These things weighed over 50 pounds and were a few feet deep. The rig is about a foot wide, 4 inches deep, and 6 inches high. Technology just amazes me sometimes. Disadvantages I have found so far: High noise level. Very weak signals are absorbed. It also has some internal noise in the MHz range that shows. You'll have to learn what it looks like and ignore it if you want to analyze higher frequencies. Of course it's not really a spectrum analyzer, it's an oscilloscope. The main problem I have with it is the horrible FFT. Don't get me wrong, having an FFT in a low-level scope like this is pretty cool. But from what I've read the FFT count is around 600. Higher level areas can have FFTs of up to 130,000 or more. A low score means you are getting very little information from your FFT and cannot trust it. Frequencies can just slip, so to speak. A firmware update (apparently included in the devices sold on this list) includes a memory mode that collects many more data points and draws a much better FFT plot, but that's still unsurprising. For higher frequencies you can also get free computer software written by another Rigol owner, but that's a bit fiddly to set up if you don't know what you're doing. The software does a good job of acquiring data from the oscilloscope via USB and performs the FFT on your computer's CPU instead of relying on the oscilloscope itself to do the heavy lifting. Triggers are also a bit finicky at times. More expensive scopes have a better trigger than this, but I can usually stabilize it reasonably well by experimenting with the trigger setting a bit. I wish it had a built in arbitrary waveform generator, but again this is a higher level feature. However, this is definitely something they could consider in future versions of their inexpensive oscilloscopes. Despite all that, I give it 5 stars because Rigol seems really determined to improve their oscilloscopes with firmware updates, and because it's so cheap it would be foolish to expect more than what it already offers. This is a solid budget framework. It's great for simpler purposes and may suffice for more complex ones. It would be great for training use, at home etc. Just look at how much similar scopes cost from "more reputable" brands and compare. We're talking 5x the price or more for their budget ranges. Let me put it this way: Before Rigol and some competitors, I could never have afforded such a good scope at this price. They came together. I bought a semi-portable digital field sight with a monochrome display for $500 in 2003 and it has little to offer other than a waveform display. No triggers, no cursors, no math functions. Everything had to be viewed by eye and calculated by hand. This Rigol scope is orders of magnitude more powerful, better in every way except being a little less portable and a little bigger and cheaper.