Rigol DS1054Z Digital Oscilloscope 50 MHz DSO 4 Channels

this has been the perfect beginners Oscilloscope. The features can't be beat for the price, light weight, portable, and upgradeable (software). Been vary accurate on testing and So far in training class it has out-classed the other available equipment. Shipped great, fast and secure. All came as described right model, color.

Excellent for the price. You won't find a much better brand-new 4-channel digital oscilloscope for the price, as of 2016. There is some decent competition from even newer players (such as Siglent), possibly with better specs according to EEVblog, but there are also a lot of bugs and other issues with some of them. I'd definitely consider the competition, but I feel that Rigol has really established itself as a solid brand.If you have ever used any oscilloscope, I'd say that the DS1054Z is actually very intuitive. I watched a few videos online of people explaining all the features first (again, mainly from EEVblog), and then spent some time with it myself, and 99% of it is pretty much self-explanatory. The number of buttons and functions was daunting at first, but it really didn't take long to learn.It's a huge improvement in every way over the only slightly cheaper and much older DS1052E. The screen is great: it's large, bright, and features a signal intensity setting similar to analog scopes. The sample rate and memory are quite high for the price. It can be upgraded to 100mhz, it has numerous trigger modes, and just in general has tons of features.Also this device is just tiny compared to the old analog scopes I used in school. Those things weighed 50+lbs and a couple feet deep. The Rigol is about a foot wide, 4 inches deep, and 6 inches tall. Technology just amazes me sometimes.Cons that I've found thus far:High-ish noise floor. Very weak signals will get swallowed up. It also has some internal noise in the MHz range that shows up. You'll have to learn what it looks like and ignore it if you are going to be analyzing higher frequencies. Of course, it's not really a spectrum analyzer, it's an oscilloscope.The main problem that I have with it is the awful FFT. Now, having an FFT in a low-end scope like this is pretty great, don't get me wrong. But, from what I've read, the FFT count is something like 600. Higher end scopes can have FFTs going up to ~130000 count or more. The low count means that you get very little information from your FFT, and you can't really trust it. Frequencies can just slip through the cracks, so to speak.A firmware update (which seems to be included with the units sold through this listing) includes a memory mode, which accumulates a lot more data points and draws a much better FFT chart, but it's still not amazing. For higher frequencies, you can also get some free computer software written by another Rigol owner, but it's a little bit of trouble to set up if you don't know what you're doing. The software does a decent job of gathering data from the scope over USB and performing an FFT on your computer's CPU, instead of relying on the scope itself to do the heavy lifting.The triggers are also a little finicky at times. More expensive scopes seem to have better triggering than this one, but I can usually get it to stabilize relatively well by playing with the trigger setting a bit. I do wish it had a built-in arbitrary waveform generator, but again that's a higher-end scope feature. It's definitely something that they could consider in future versions of their low-end scopes, though.Despite all this, I give it 5 stars, because Rigol seem genuinely dedicated to improving their scopes through firmware updates, and because it's so cheap that it'd be silly to expect more than it already delivers. It's a solid low-end scope. It's great for simpler uses, and can suffice in a pinch for more complex ones. It'd be great for educational use, home use, etc. Just look at what similar scopes from the more 'respected' brands cost and compare. We're talking somewhere in the realm of 5x the price or more for their lower-end scopes.Let me put it this way: I would have never been able to afford a scope this nice for this price before Rigol and some of their competition came along. I bought a semi-portable digital scope for field work w/a monochrome display in 2003 for $500 and it has little more to it beyond a waveform display. No triggers, no cursors, no math functions. Everything had to be eyeballed and hand-calculated. This Rigol scope is orders of magnitude more powerful, better in every way except it's slightly less portable and slightly larger, and yet it costs less.

This is my first oscilloscope. I started off in Computer Science in college, and programming was my main passion for most of my life. I only discovered electronics about 5-6 years ago, and it's been my life since then! I've built many projects involving microcontrollers, Raspberry Pi, single-board computers, etc. So far, I've gotten by with mainly my voltmeter and studying my circuit issues on paper. I've delayed getting an oscilloscope for years due to the high cost. Well not anymore! I looked into it time and time again, but this particular one caught my eye. It has very good reviews in the hobbyist community, and seems like a solid choice. So given my background, I have a solid concept of how I would use it, but have yet to use mine for anything other than learning about it. This is why I trust the reviews of other more experienced people out there.I only received my scope a few days ago, and the first thing I did was adjust the compensation of all my probes using the built-in square wave generator, which was cool. So far everything seems to work as expected, and the device is very well packaged for protection (double-walled box, thick closed-cell foam brackets). The probes seem quite nice, and work as I would expect. The manual covers the basics, but it is NOT a oscilloscope tutorial. I've been poking around the menus and the other basic functions, but there's so much there, I probably will never use most of it. It's nice to know it's there, though. The help function is really cool.The overall unit feels very solid. The screen is very nice - it's got a nice matte surface and the color looks good to me. It does lose a lot of brightness when viewed from below the screen (ie. when the scope is above you and you need to look up at it). There's no problem when viewing from above or from the sides by my eyes. People have complained about the fan, and while it's a little noisy, it's not THAT big of a deal for me. Yes, I would prefer it was more quiet. There is info out there on people replacing their fans. It appears to be a 60mm fan, and I'd probably try to put a Noctua fan in there, since I'm a big fan (pun intended) of theirs.Once I confirmed that my probes were basically working, I went online to do my "upgrade hack". My machine is very new, and has software version 00.04.03.SP2. I can confirm that the online hack DOES work on this firmware version. As soon as I entered it, the installed options all lost their "expiration time" readings, indicating they are permanently functional. Haven't yet tested them.I'm hoping to get to know my new scope much more in the upcoming months. I'll probably start off checking the power rails on a single-board computer I'm building now, and then probably check the system clocks just to familiarize myself with looking at pretty simple signals, and getting the graphs to appear in a way that makes sense to me. Maybe then I'll get into figuring out how to trigger stuff in a way that makes sense.So I'm very happy with it, and so far I would recommend it.

Had this for several weeks. This is a well built reasonably priced scope that works as advertised. Very happy with the purchase.

Excelente equipo para comenzar a practicar el uso del osciloscopio en electronica, lleno de funciones que llevaran un buen tiempo de dominar cada una de ellas.