Low-end oscilloscope market gets more crowded

Keysight Technologies is competing on features at the market's entry level.

The market for low-end or about $500 to $1,000 digital storage oscilloscopes or DSOs has new a player: Keysight Technologies. This already crowded market, with perhaps 100 models across several manufacturers, just picked up another four, the InfiniiVision 1000 X-Series of DSOs. Keysight is betting that its name and product features will win over engineers, technicians and educators in this most price-sensitive segment of the oscilloscope market.

"We compare the 1000 X-Series to the Rigol 1000Z and Tektronix TBS1000B series," Keysight business development engineer Mike Hoffman told EE Times.

The 1000 X-Series has comparable bandwidth and price to the TBS1000B series, but with far more waveform memory (100 ksamples and 1 Msample versus Tek's 2.5 ksamples). Plus, the 1000 X-Series DSOs include two models with a function generator. Compared to the Rigol 1000Z series, the 1000 X-Series lacks a mixed-signal option and has less memory that Rigol's 12 Msamples. One place where the 1000 X-Series shines is its ability to display 50,000 waveforms/sec on the screen.

Hoffman explained that Keysight took technology developed for the InfiniiVision 2000-X series and applied it to the 1000 X-Series. That is where features such as the function generator, frequency counter, digital voltmeter, masks and FFT come from.

To read the full article, go to EETimes.