Hi welcome to an unboxing and first impressions review I guess of a Wavejet touch from Teledyne Lacroix. I'm Teledyne Le Croy. It's like a hyphenated marriage name. I don't like.

it's just Lacroix. Okay, so Lacroix Wavejet? Uh, touch oscilloscope. So thank you very much to Lacroix for sending this thing in now. Uh, it is not, uh, new.

It's uh, it's not a new model. It's about, um, 12 months old. I think it came out September 2014. So it's not particularly new.

I believe it's the 500 Megahertz model and we'll go into, uh, details of that ta-da what's in the box? There we go. let's have a look. We have accessories. We'll check those out in a minute and oh, just came off just fell off.

Not sure what the deal is there. All right, here we go. it's out there. we go got ourselves.

Hang on, Hang on. Oh yeah, it's got that 500 Megahertz smell. Um, now I believe this is actually not a Teledyne Lacroix designed unit. It's actually Um designed and sold by um, Iwatsu.

and uh, Lacroix have, uh, re-badged Iwatsu stuff before, so I'm not sure what type. You know if it's just a pure re-badge or they've you know, tweaked some firmware and done some. you know other things for it, but it's basically an Iwatsu Ds 5600 series. It's basically identical.

so let's have a look at the uh accessories we've got in here. Um, Lacroix also, uh, re-badge uh, signal signal and um scopes at the low end as well. This is not a cigarette, it's an Iwatsu Japanese company. They actually make a really decent gear, so look at this half of the box just for a bloody power cord.

It's got one of those funny yankee bloody things on it. no good for me and looks like we've got uh, four probes they're 500 megahertz? okay, no worries at all and some manuals. What do we got? Got a manual? don't care, We'll figure out how to use it. Warranty? yeah, whatever.

and ta-da calibration certificate. Fantastic model. It's the wave jet 354 T Um T stands for touch of course. This is a new Touch model and uh.

there we go. Last calibrated 7th of November, Um. 2014. So it's been in stock a while and there's no individual test results there.

That's just a conformity thing. So yeah, it's just a basically a cow certificate. And you get the cow sticker on the front as well. That's all right.

Well, I gotta say, my first impression is that this is the most horribly bland oscilloscope I've ever seen. Look. It's all just black. I'm not sure what they were going for.

The sticker doesn't look at like it's been stuck. It looks like it's just been tacked on like it is a re-badger or something like that. and there's just no style to it at all. It's terrible.

Um, the flip feet. But you know, and okay, it's not a big deal, right? The looks of the damn thing. The feet. They feel quite reasonable.

No problems at all. We've got ourselves the times 10, uh, auto ring around there. Fantastic. No problems at all.

Good thing about this is that it is actually four channels plus an external trigger as well. So a lot of Um scopes. A lot of four channel scopes actually sacrifice the external trigger. This one doesn't nice.

and it's not on the back, it's on the front exactly where you need it. Now one thing you'll notice is that this is not a mixed signal scope. There is no logic analyzer option with this thing at all. With this particular model, you see it's not on the back either.

that is deliberate. It's uh, much lower cost as we'll go into shortly. But Lacroix actually do have what's called the Logic Studio 16, which is a separate Usb 16 channel logic analyzer and it's designed to work in conjunction with this, but not on the screen. It's designed to hook up both of them, hook up to a Pc, and then you can use the Pc software to get your mixed signal scope on there.

So if after a mixed signal scope, this one is just really not going to do it unless you want to combine it with the Pc and that's not inconvenient for you. Generally the advantage the mixed signal scopes with a logic analyzer built in is that there's just convenience. Everything's in the one scope all the time. You don't have to worry about, uh, you know, having a Pc on your bench and all that sort of stuff.

So that's a downside to this. There is no option for it, but you're not also not paying for the capability. and there it is. Made in Japan and they even tell you they don't hide it at all.

Manufactured by Iwatsu Test Instrument Corp for Teledyne Lacroix. so it's definitely a uh, Iwatsu 5600 series and on the back looks like it comes. I not sure if Gpib is standard, I think it might be. We've got Ethernet and Usb as well, and just an auxiliary out.

That's it. So yeah, nothing fancy. No external 10 megahertz reference input. One very disappointing emission from a scope of this class.

No external video at all. Maybe that's what the cutout was originally for, but I see no option whatsoever in the specs for an external monitor, and that's a bit of a bummer. Oh, you'll notice that. uh.

Also, there's no like a probe compartment like you get in the Keysight 3000 series for example. and or like a separate pouch for the probes like you get on, say, the Tektronix Mdo 3000. They didn't give you a pro pouch, so it's a bit disappointing. Nowhere to put your probes, which is a shame in such a nice small compact unit like this.

And that's the first thing that struck me about this is how narrow it is. I mean, compare it to the Rygole 1000 series. Okay, can't compare the specs of course, but it's exactly the same width. It's the higher, of course.

it's got a bigger square screen on it, but um, and they weigh about the same. It's a bit deeper, but geez, if you haven't got much, uh, like width on your bench and you want a nice, um, narrow unit like this, no problems whatsoever. and it fits under a typical instrument shelf like that. No problems at all and also up on a shelf wouldn't have an issue.

So one thing I immediately noticed. look at the knobs. here. You can actually see the metal shaft down in there.

You can see it. Um, that's a bit how you're doing. I'm um, a bit. just.

I was a bit taken back by that. It looks just a little bit shoddy. They could have like got a deeper knob on there. It's like they just whacked in some dodgy knob and didn't really give that finer, you know, touch a thought, look at that.

Hmm. Anyway, the knobs are all pushable. You can see, uh, push to zero of course. And we've got the separate four channels of course, which is fantastic.

but unfortunately on such a narrow unit like this, they can't line up the B and C's with the controls. But yeah, it's You know you just have to live with that. And this isn't filler vision. but the indents in the knob? very firm, very firm.

and uh, actually, that's like a 24 position one or something. Very, very fine. So yeah, I like that. And the probes look and feel pretty decent as well as you'd expect on a top name instrument like this.

Very sharp point, feels really nice. that's a pretty, that's a nice feeling. Easy hook and I love the uh, the quality look and feel of um, look at the diecast alloy box on there. It's just like really like old school stuff.

Love it. And it comes with your standard accessories, your color coded uh things here. but you know, like why couldn't they have the color code to match like splash a color on the front like other scopes do? No, it reminds me seen if these match the colors on the screen alignment tool and your high frequency grounding point spring attachment as well. So that's your basic standard fare, but I would have liked to have seen what you get on the keysight ones.

For example, you get the nice little um Bnc attachment that you can actually uh, whack this on and that goes straight into a B and C. you know, Come on, you could have included that anyway. 500 megahertz rate of bandwidth uh par for the course on a 500 Meg scope and of course a fixed times 10 probe. None of that cheap ass times one rubbish you get on the cheap scopes.

Uh, 12 puff input capacitance a little bit on the high side. um although you know compared to the new Agilent ones, they're only 11. uh, puffy, You know you can't beat these. Uh, Tektronix 3.9 puff Uh.

one gig passive chrome probes which came with the Mdo 3000 there. Oh, they're the ducks cuts. Wow, Look at this symmetrical oscilloscope stacking just like the Philadelphia Mass Turbulence at 1947. And this could be a real expensive stack here.

But compared to the the width compared to the Tektronix Mdo 3000, the Keysight Uh 3000 which has got the new touch just like this wavejet has touched, you can see how narrow it is and also compared to the Gw in stack Um, which is about the same width as the Agilent one there. and height wise it's actually the shortest as well. The Tektronix Mdo was uh in the back here. Um, so it's about the same size as the Uh Keysight, but yeah, it's the shortest of the bunch.

So if you're after the smallest, most compact 500 Megahertz 4 channel scope for your bench, this one's the bomb. Now about the only competing 500 Megahertz four channel scope we don't have here is the Rygold Ds 4000 Series. Now this one. one of the huge selling points of the Uh Wavejet touch here is that it's actually the cheapest.

It's even cheapest, uh, cheaper than the Rigol unit, the Rygold Ds4000 for the four channel 500 Megahertz version. Six and a half thousand dollars. The Uh. Lacroix we're looking at here today.

Five thousand dollars? Uh, Us? of course. uh, street price. The Gw Instagram is actually very similar, so these are comparable, uh in price. This is only the 300 megahertz version, but it does come in 500 megahertz, Uh one and the Gw in stack.

There is Uh 5000 as well. and the Keysight and the Tektronix of course. completely different price bracket. These are about 11 000 each for your basic Uh Four Channel 500 megahertz version.

Of course the Mdor 3000. You get the free built-in Uh spectrum analyzer, so that's its big selling point. But yeah, these are more than twice the price of what we're looking at today, So just remember that and in terms of speed and memory. both of these units, the Instax and the Lacroix They're both 2 gig samples per second, whereas the Tektronix is the winner in sample rate at five gig samples per second.

Actually, I think the new Um Keysight Touch one is actually five gig samples per second as well. I think they upped it so these are a faster class unit. Yes, it does use interleave sampling so that two gig sample per second will actually have if you try and use Uh two channels so they must have the one similar to Uh like the Agilent and others. They have the one Asic controlling the two channels so that'll drop down to what one gig sample per second when you have um, all four channels on and the wavejet? uh, it's got uh, five meg, uh, sample memory, which once again will halve to 2.5 meg if you've got the multiple Arc channels turned on.

The Mdo 3000 is very similar and the key keysight ones only. uh, four meg as well. The Gw instick is the big loser here. It's only got 25 uh k of sample memory.

It's yeah, it just doesn't cut the mustard, but if you're after sample memory, uh, the rye Goal is what you want because it's got a hundred and forty meg uh, sample memory for not much more cost for an extra one and a half thousand dollars above the wave jet here. And because of its narrow size here, it's only got a square form factor. Our screen Very similar to the Gw in stack there, the Keysight and the Tektronix. They have both a wide wide screen format display, which almost certainly means that we're going to get more horizontal divisions on these than we'll get on these two.

It's neither here nor there. It's the price you pay for having a small compact unit. Really, there's no way they could fit all four channels in here and have a wide screen in that form factor. You just can't do it.

You've got to sacrifice something. Anyway, it's a pretty decent seven and a half inch uh touchscreen on it. We'll power it up and uh, see in a minute how well it touches and does all that touchy feely stuff. But it's only 640 by 480.

like I would have. You know, these days I would have expected. you know, 800 by 600 or something. I pretty disappointed by that.

It means that you know you can't get the vertical resolution in more than one waveform, for example. So yeah, it's a tad disappointing. I would have expected better for this sort of price bracket, but hey, this is an entry-level 500 megahertz scope. It's basically the cheapest one on the market with a reasonable amount of memory.

If you don't count the Gw, uh, in, stick with. it's 25k. It's only five thousand dollars half the price of these units here. I know this is a personal preference thing, but you've got to admit, this is pretty ugly.

I mean, the Gw instinct is sort of like it's like an ugly interface. It just looks like sort of, you know, cheap and uh, sort of. you know, slapped together. It hasn't been done by an industrial uh designer.

But the wave jet look it. It's just all black. What were they going for? I don't know. And of course, there's one thing that this thing lacks, which all the other three have is an arbitrary waveform generator uh, building, which of course is an optional large cost on most of these other ones.

But yet, we don't even have the option here. So this really is a bare bones 500 megahertz unit if you're just after bandwidth for the price, that's what that's the market they're going for here. And the other thing you're not going to get is a like a external powered multifunction probe interface. You've got your times 10 ring down there and that looks like um, it.

but I'll tell you what these feel real quality connections. you just ah yeah, that instills a lot of confidence. I love that the diecast metal case on there. it just feels really rugged and professional.

Excellent. So enough crapping on. Let's power this thing up and see what we get. It's supposed to have a super duper fast boot time.

One, two, three, four. Oh look under five seconds and she's up and running. Bloody winner. Awesome! Why can't all scopes be like that? Ah, this is a fantastic scope for taking bench to bench and just getting on with the job.

Well they do have color-coded lit up buttons here that do kind of sort of match the colored rings in here for the probes. but no, that's not your imagination. That one that that is supposed to be yellow, but it kind of looks like the green over here it. it just doesn't really work that well.

Now the first thing I noticed with the screen is the width of the menu here and it appears quite wide and if you get rid of it you've got all that wasted space. The screen doesn't expand over like that, but that's identical to the keysight one because that's a function on the key side, it's a function of the asic. uh, matching the megazoom for asic, matching directly and writing directly to the memory to get the million waveform updates per second. They might be doing a similar thing here, mapping directly to the screen so that you know, like directly from the acquisition hardware so that they can't so they're not software scaling to get the fastest update possible.

And if that's the case and so be it. But yeah, look, we could have squeezed in some more divisions in there. That would have been nice. And if you compare that screen with the uh Gw instic down here, yeah, we've got the same ten divisions across, but look and and basically almost the same with that screen.

But yeah, we're getting the full width on there. so you're losing a lot of signal information on the Lacroix. and if you compare it with the Tektronix Mdo 3000, same number of divisions. Because Tektronix actually, you know, stretch their divisions out.

They aren't actually square, so you've still got the same 10 divisions across, but much more signal information on the screen compared with the Lacroix up here and compared with the Keysight down here. Once again, all of them have the 10 divisions across. I think the Rye Goal has like the 12 or 14 divisions across. It's uh, it's a different uh beast.

Okay, I'm going to test the lower screen angle like you'd typically see if you had this up on an instrument bench. Now I've got the same fixed exposure for each one of those. So there's the Lacroix. There's the keysight, very nice, Gw Instax, and the tech Mdo.

So they're all very, very similar on the lowish angle and on the high angle. There we go. they're all doing quite well. One thing I immediately noticed when I call up say the display menu here.

like there's no specific waveform intensity knob on this thing. So what you've got to do is call up the display menu and then it shows. Excuse my exposed, overexposed finger here. That's what you get when you've got a black oscilloscope like this.

the waveform intensity currently set to 85. It shows that like a almost like a little knob thing, but that this is what you have to adjust. Here we go so we can adjust that, which is all fine and dandy, but it doesn't have the matching symbol up there to tell you like you've just got to know that's the adjust symbol and it's and you can't touch it. I mean yeah, the touchscreen works here so we can go from our dot to our vector mode and we can call up a different type.

So I kind of like that offset menu I think anyway. but yeah, um, it's just not obvious. I don't know. Give me a waveform intensity knob.

and the other thing I immediately look for is like some sort of acquisition menu to change the memory depth. Because it's saying down here we're only 500 points. So you know it's it's the lowest, like fastest updater rate you can get. So I wanted to change that.

But like, there's like a utilities button up here. It's not the utilities and you go okay. Well, it must be the horizontal setup. That's it.

Because we've got a trigger area. We've got a replay area, which is nice, but you know it's there's not in here. And look, you've got a closed menu button here. I mean, why? Like you've wasted a button.

Like why? You know when you've got a touch scope. I don't necessarily get it. especially when you're not gaining any information there. You know, why? get rid of your menu and have a dedicated button for that? Doesn't make sense.

Anyway, going to the horizontal delay. Bingo. We're in like Flynn and there's our max memory depth there so we can. You know we're gonna.

It would have been better if they just made these buttons smaller like so you could have more on the one screen. I mean, there's no reason. Look at all that dead space above and below. I know you know it's good for fat fingers and things like that.

But anyway, there's our five meg points. So no, we're not in like Flynn. We can't do it. There we go.

We can only do that at uh, five. We can only do the five. Uh, the 2.5 Meg points. There, We go: 2.5 at 500 Meg samples per second.

If we turn off the other channels, you'll see that we get the five Meg points. Return On the second channel, it'll halve to two and a half, and the sample rate halves as well. But if you turn on the third channel, it shouldn't do that. No, it remains the same.

So they've obviously got a dedicated asic chip just like in the keysight and many other scopes. four per two channels. So that's just a little uh trick. If you want to maximize your sample rate and your memory and you're only using two channels, then use channel one and three or two and four.

And what does empty mean? And the lowest volts per division we've got is that two millivolts? Uh, per division here. And yes, our auto probe interface works. Bingo! Jumps up to 20 millivolts with our times. 10 uh probe? can we touch these? Not so much.

for our touch screen scope. We've got to use our channel button over here. and um, yeah, it's got all the color. It's got a Ac and Dc coupling for one Meg and it's also got 50 ohm impedance uh mode as well.

That's why it's going Burka. It's picking up the 50 hertz. oh look, switching frequency of the screen. That's common though.

Actually, I'll show you the different screen switching here. We go. That's the Lacroix, that's the Agilent, A Keysight sorry, that's the Gw instead. and that's the Tektronix Mdo.

And it's got all the requisite uh, stuff in the vertical menu. You can invert it, You can set up your probe and stuff like that. Look, it doesn't like have a return button or anything like that. You've actually got to hit that up there, which is a little bit of a quirk.

Now, one thing I don't know what's going on here is usually the vertical control. Okay, you push that. It's a pushable no, but it doesn't seem to do anything. I'd expect it to go into fine course and fine mode here, but of course it doesn't And we've got our regular one, two five sequence of course, but it doesn't.

You're going to go up here, select fine, and then you can do it, and you push it and you're still in fine mode. Why, Why is that pushable? What does it do? Tell you. One thing I'm not fond of is the trigger level. You can see the trigger level going up down there.

I would have liked to have seen a, uh, no, we can't That good. I can just poke at the screen and not do anything we can't pinch and zoom. By the way, there's none of that. You know, none of that fancy pantsy touch screen is looks like it's just for the menus.

That's it. Although, you can actually call up, looks like you can call up the different channels. Ah, was that not working before? Anyway, yeah, the trigger level goes up. Why is there a line there? Give me a line just for a few seconds while I'm moving it.

Thank you very much. I'm not particularly keen that the run stop and single shot buttons are just like here. Like just in the middle of the layout. They haven't really thought about it.

you know, unlike, uh, the other scopes sort of make them prominent up the top. here. That would have been a classic, you know, run stop, bigger, nicer, huge buttons. But no, it's just tucked away, buried in there all the same.

Yeah, it's lit up, but you know, like it's no, no, no. Anyway, I forgot about to finish the vertical menu. here. you can set up all your volts and all that sort of stuff and power.

and for different types of probes, so that's pretty cool. Uh, you can rescale stuff and being with uh, limits, uh, we've got 400 Megahertz, 22 and 200. that's a bit unusual. You don't often get that so that's not too shabby.

That's not too shabby at all. And that's our per uh channel of course. And it's got, uh, high pass, low pass and uh, what's this? um, Sma filter? Oh, look at this so it looks like we can set up a software filter here and we can change the width. Can't touch that.

Um, a plus minus one point up to 25 points. Is that a rolling average filter? Like a uh, high res mode? Of course what they got here. They do have a regular high mes res mode if we go into like they've got peak detect of course and average and then you go into the high resolution mode. There we go.

It's clean, that wave form up a lot. It's doing the rolling average there. box car averaging. Also this is mislabeled.

It says uh, level push to find? Okay, it doesn't. It resets it back to zero as you'd expect, right? That's fine and dandy. Um, but it doesn't. You know it's a push to find what? What hold it down? No.

like what the hell? push, find? What does that mean? I don't know. Anyway, if we've stopped it and we play with our horizontal adjust here, it it's a bit jerky. I don't really like that. I've only got 10k points.

It's not like it's gotta go through a whole bunch. I would have preferred that to be much smoother and you can actually hear the uh, you can hear the knob. So yeah, that's it's not the most responsive thing in our vertical channel. Similar sort of bit of jerkiness with it.

It's not that not that smooth and this is quite funny. You push the help button here and it does nothing. It doesn't even pop off a message to say please push another button so we can go help and we can go close menu, execute button, and press this button to clear pop-up boxes. There we go.

We just got our help there on the Sma Yes and it's what I thought. It's a smooth waveform through a uh moving average filter. So there's the uh noise with the one meg input and maximum memory debt. So I've got full 5 meg memory on the thing so you can see the effect of the filtering.

So if we go to like 20 meg input, it's going to lower as well. but we can actually go into the up bandwidth filter and we can. There's our simple moving average filter as well and we can adjust that right down. You can see the slow update rate when I turn that knob.

There's no updating at all. Look at that. zero screen updating. It's completely stopped.

Wow, that's a bit of a fail. And of course I've done a whole video on why digital scopes and noisy like this has to do with the memory depth and the update rate and all sorts of stuff. so that is not inherently bad. Uh, just remember though.

uh, minimum volts per division. Only two millivolts per division. won't even go down to one. So yeah, not as good as some modern ones with their 500 microvolts per division range.

All right, I know everyone wants to see the variable uh intensity display. Something weird going on there. Look at that. Don't particularly like that.

This is my standard test signal I use for this test. It's a one megahertz sine wave uh, carrier 100 modulated with a one kilohertz uh, sine wave. And yeah, anyway, what we're testing is waveform intensity. Here, you can see that there's really nothing in there at all.

This is going to be highly dependent upon the the memory depth here. So for example, if we go right down 50k points, it just doesn't have enough data to start showing those sort of artifacts. Let me show you on the keysight. So there it is on the keysight and this signal is a bit hard to trigger on.

so often you get a nice trigger jitter in there. it's often. it's a little bit tricky business. Anyway, look at that variable intensity display.

Look at that. It's just beautiful. Very analog like. But even if we give that the maximum amount of memory possible, it like it still doesn't still doesn't do the business on the variable intensity there.

I mean, you know it. it has the capability. It's got variable intensity display. on this test though.

it's just yeah, it does not do the business at all. But if we turn our spectrum on, let's have a look at that. There we go. There's our spectrum that doesn't really do anything for me either.

No, no, no look. Even the Gw instinct does a half reasonable job of that. And the Tektronix Mda really has trouble uh, triggering on this, But as you can see, that does a reasonable job of it too. So yeah, I wouldn't be buying this thing for its, uh, waveform update rate, nor its, uh, variable intensity display.

Doesn't cut the mustard, it's You know it's okay as a general purpose scope, but yeah, it's just outclassed by the others in that respect. Now I'll tell you what I'm liking the look of. I've gone into the measure menu here, switched it on. It seems to take up, um, all that space regardless of whether or not you have looks like you've got four different measurements.

You can set up a B, C, and D, and you can actually select those here. Where was it? You could select them, I swear, allow you to select A B, C, or D. But anyway, it turns on all four. A B C D.

Even if you don't use them, that just chews up vertical space. I don't like it. It could have been smarter than that. And another thing I've noticed, if you've got a long memory on and it's just slowly updating like that, then you can actually get missed, look, missed, um, screen touches.

So yeah, it's just hit and miss. Jeez, that's that's. pretty terrible. Muriel, Check it out.

The thing can even miss button presses as well. Jeez, that's no good. Now, as far as the triggering options go, Um, fairly basic. We've only got well, you know it's it's got all the requisite stuff generally.

I mean it does pulse count which is pretty good. um, alternate edge and stuff like that. uh, pulse width drop out which is a requisite Tv and it does all logical uh functions between channels. And yes, you can trigger on some standard buses here so we can trigger on I Squared C here.

and that's what I'm feeding in here, so let's see if we can set that up. Okay, so we can trigger on our I Squared C data in there and you can see all you know you can trigger on. Here we go. We've got a 10-bit address and data and we can do E-squared prom and stuff like that and we can go in there and and have a look at it and it's all okay, but okay.

we can trigger on it, but this scope has no ability to decode any serial data at all, so that's the same for the Spi and the uart. It can't do any decoding. They've left that up to the entirely separate dart logic analyzer module, so it almost kind of defeats the purpose of having a five thousand dollar whiz-bang scope that can trigger on I Squared C stuff. Okay, you can capture it and have a look and download and go analyze it later.

or you know you're forced to buy the separate uh logic analyzer module. At least you know the other scopes here can do serial decoding. You don't need to use the logic analyzer, they just use the analog channels like this one can. It can trigger off it.

But yeah, that's pretty darn disappointing. So yeah, unfortunately, there's no like real advanced stuff like uh, you know, a runt pulse, uh, trigger and stuff like that. You know it's it's. got a few options in here for various upholf with stuff.

There's no uh, ryze, fall time, uh, trigger or anything like that. Unfortunately, now I swear there's a bug on this Fft function. You go into the math menu. of course.

it's got all the requisite. You know, it's got the actually very basic, uh, math, uh, capability in here. I mean, yeah, it can do integrals and, uh, derivatives and stuff. but you know, nothing more fancy than that.

Anyway, go into Fft and look. I cannot use that now. use the horizontal time base. okay to actually scroll.

Look, it's now vanished. You see the waveforms updating, but something's still happening. But there's no waveform. The red waveform is gone.

It's like now. it's showing like 50 kilohertz. Okay, that's our span, right? Change it to: 25 kilohertz, 10 kilohertz. nothing.

There's nothing there. I don't know what the hell is going on here at all. Yeah, I don't know what happened there. I moved the horizontal.

I've got it over. I've got it back and then now kind. it seems to be doing the business now. So yeah, I don't know.

could be a Peb Cac. but yeah, I I don't know why that's gone very dim now, whereas uh, we go back to that spam. We go back to our five kilohertz span and everything's dory and uh, yeah, I don't know. and I swear I can't get back in and adjust the horizontal time base in our time domain without having to exit the math mode.

so I I don't know what's going on there at all. That's just bizarre. Hmm. Anyway, I generally hate Fft modes on scopes.

They're just. this one's no different. Okay, we'll do our hideously unfair clock glitch test. I've got my keysight scope actually generating one missing, uh, clock pulse every million look at that so you can see the little see because this thing has a million waveform updates, uh, per second.

Let's try it on the Lacroix over here. I don't like our chances. No, I don't think we have a chance there at all. Let me turn variable.

uh, persistence on. We finally captured it in infinite persistence mode there and it took 48 seconds. But yeah, that's not uncommon. As I said, that's not a fair test.

This is not a fast updating scope. Now I'll show you the feature I like most about this scope is the replay mode. Yeah, you get replay modes on other scopes. This one is always on.

You don't have to switch it on, you can't even switch it off that I don't think you can anyway. I'm so that might be impacting its ultimate update performance and all that sort of stuff, but it's always there. So if you press stop like this, you've got up to uh, 2000 there. There's the counter.

that'll probably depend on memory depth i haven't uh, tried that yet and you can just scroll backwards through that. Now, if we're incredibly, incredibly lucky, we might see one of our runt pulses in there. But it's only captured 2 000 screens there and that run poll and that, uh, missing clock pulse was one in a million. So our chances are not good of actually capturing that thing in there.

so let's get something more frequent. But anyway, I love this replay, but it's just always there. Every time you press stop, it's instantly captured up to 2000 previous cycles. So here's an example.

We've just got a Uh signal here and you can see some runt pulses. Got some run pulses in there? Maybe look, yeah, there it is. There, It is. You can see it.

It's fast enough, don't you know? it's good enough for general use. Uh, updating? You can see some runt pulses in there. Okay, and if we let's just turn that out a bit and if we, uh, stop that, of course. Okay, we've got there it is.

We've got all of our previous waveforms and maybe I don't know how frequently that run pulse occurs actually. but we can scroll through all two thousand previous ones and well, yeah, twiddle your thumbs. Hang on. We might capture it eventually.

Here we go. I just, uh, whacked the time base out there. We go. We've captured one already on our first screen.

We got lucky. but even if we go back through here, we go. We should be able to find one. Should be able to find another one.

There It is there. it is. Got him. Got him.

fantastic. So it's always there. That replay mode. Yeah, that's very nice.

That gets a big thumbs up. I like that. But you can see how we've dropped back to our 426 there because of our time base is, uh, different. So if we take that out right out there 222, we take our time base out.

even. Oh, we got some alias in there and stop 161. There we go. We're just getting less and less and less and but that's what you expect.

Let's take this one, for example. Look at this. replay back and look. Oh, look at that.

Look at that. We've got something, uh, some packety uh type thing happening there. What's going on there? Look at that. There we go.

captured. We haven't got a huge I don't know if that's a no that could. Yeah, that's a limitation of our sample rate, so our sample rate wasn't particularly high there. but you can see that we captured that with that.

uh, replay mode there. Beautiful. Very handy. We can we capture one down the bottom as well? Look at that.

Fantastic. and can this thing alias? well? There's our one megahertz signal and you betcha it can. Jeez, I don't think it hasn't any aliasing feature at all. That's terrible.

So what's its? Waveform update rate? Well, single channel on displaying a one megahertz square wave. That's a standard way to do it. 500 points memory. I've got the fastest possible memory mode on, so normal sampling, not doing anything.

Nothing at all. Let's give it a go. There we go: Four Kilohertz or so. Four thousand waveform updates per second.

Because this has got an auxiliary trigger out, which is auxiliary output which we have selected to output the trigger pulse. And so that's the trigger pulse we're looking at there and it's like, yeah, it's four point Four. Four thousand, Five hundred waveforms per second. It's bugger all.

It's a slow scope, but it's not as short as the Gw in Stack. Here There we go. Display now. Uh, we're on.

uh, short. uh. acquisition memory. Where are we? Yep, Record length Short.

No problems at all. and that one's only a Kilohertz. Thank you very much. A thousand waveform updates per second? What? Yeah, For those playing along at home wondering about the Tektronix Mdo 3000 update rate as well, which you covered in a previous video, there we go.

No problems at all. 166 000 Actually, I'll stand corrected on that. The best I can get is around about six kilohertz or so, so six thousand waveform updates per second. One feature I do like is the just the dedicated print button.

Yeah, all scopes have print buttons, but this one by default just does exactly what you want. Now, I found a limitation with this. Um, it didn't like. uh, standard fat memory sticks by the looks of it, didn't recognize it whereas the other scopes did.

Anyway, Um, whack this one in and we just go print and that's it. Saved Screenshot: Triple One dot Png. It's exactly It's the right format you want, you want Png and then you do it again. and it says the second screenshot.

There's no setting up, there's no around, it just works Beauty. So those Usb sticks need to be fat32 by the looks of it. Um, this is, uh, interesting. Take a look at this.

We've got power management in here. Power off and you can set it to power off after 60 minutes if you want. Okay, backlight intensity medium low? Geez, Yep, hi, Thank you very much. Backlight And the backlight saver.

Why? it's a Led backlight, right? Yes, by the way, this uh, trigger counter here. It's um, well, it's actually a hardware, uh frequency counter. That's what you get in down the bottom here. always.

That's very nice. And of course, with that Usb print screen you can do, you know all the requisite uh stuff, whether you want transparency and background and what file format you want, who the hell uses Tiff anymore? Png for the win and for those playing along at home, that's the version of the scope that we've got. So yeah, it's a 2014 firmware. I don't know about the firmware update options, if there's any new ones, or how easy it is to get an upgrade and all that sort of stuff.

and, well, there's no hardware options. I don't think there are. and I do believe the 350 500 megahertz bandwidth on this thing is purely like a software type configuration. I greatly doubt that the hardware is different and the auxiliary out Bnc connector on the back as you've seen, we've been using it for the trigger signal.

You can also do the pass fail as well. and this thing does have a pass. Fail limit testing. I don't think I could be bothered on this.

First impressions one going out going in and uh, checking that I'm sure it you know, does the basic functionality of your pass fail masking and it goes without saying. the dual time base um zoom thing that just goes in like that and bam, you're in. that's you know. Pretty standard fare for uh, pretty much any scope on the market.

And by the way, this uh, replay function which I love. it doesn't actually allow you to like auto, scroll through or something like that. I can't find an option to actually do that. So if you want to go through all 2000, you've got to keep turning the knob.

Geez, that's going to be some wear and tear on that puppy. If we're going to measure here into the second menu, it turns out this login is like it's what it implies. It's actually not logging, uh, the data downloading the data. it's just logging the measurement data.

So the pass fail measurement data and you can actually save that to Usb memory. I tried it, saves it to a Csv file. so good for production type pass fail testing. But apart from that and not much, not much ordinary use really.

And all your basic uh waveform reference stuff that all works there, There you go. I just captured a Uh a reference and kept it there and it's all pretty basic. And of course it's got your uh, typical save recall function so you can save your setups, but you can also, uh, save your waveform data as well to your Usb stick. So in your file formats, here you've got binary waveform data for your masochists.

You've got just their regular Ascii stuff stuff from Mathcad. You can save your waveform data, You can save your waveform in binary and all that sort of jazz. so we will save that to our Usb stick. That's handy if you want to analyze your data.

uh, you know, in Matlab or some other you know, software, Excel or whatever you want to do, So you know this is pretty par for the course on any scope of this sort of class. Well, pretty much any class these days. And a big thing with all bench instruments. How loud is it? Well, it's got a fan.

inside looks like a, you know, a what is it one of those 80 millimeter uh, jobs or something. Yeah, it's not the quietest scope, that's for sure. Out of these four scopes here, it is, uh, definitely the loudest. Not obscenely loud, but uh, the Gw instinct.

Uh, second loudest. And then the keysight. And the quietest was the Mdo 3000 from Tech and I get my sound meter out and try and get a quantitative measurement at one meter, but it's kind of hard in this sort of office environment. Let's just say, when I've got nothing else on no Aircon, no other instruments at all, it's quite noticeable.

So I think this thing's been going for an over an hour's worth of footage. so it's a lot longer than I thought I'd do for a, uh, unboxing, first Impressions video. and well, what's my verdict so far? Granted, I've only been using this for like the hour that I've been shooting this video, so I haven't used it in depth. But geez, I don't know.

There's not a huge amount going for it. I've got to admit, it's a plane. Well, it's exactly what I guess as advertised: a cheap entry level four channel 500 megahertz scope. No extra bells and whistles, no fancy triggering, no serial decoding, no options for logic analyzers, waveform generators, all that sort of jazz.

It's not that quick. It's only you know, a couple of thousand, uh, five thousand, six thousand waveform updates. uh, per second. It's a bit unresponsive.

Not a huge amount of trigger options, everything else. You know, it's really just plain vanilla. I do love the replay function that's really quite nice. Always on.

I think that's pretty handy. and well, the other thing going for it is the price. It's only five grand, so for a current brand new name brand, it's one of the big three or big four. Now if you count Rye Gold I guess, um, it's You know, it's basically the cheapest option out there.

I'd rather have this than the Gw, um, instic. For example, the Gw Instinct has some extra bells and whistles, but this one's just a little bit more professional and I like the small compact form factor. It's very nice. If you've got uh, you know, minimum absolute minimum amount of bench space and you want four channels 500 megahertz, it's probably worth a look.

But yeah, it's pretty plain vanilla though. And just be aware too. Of course, only two gig samples per second. So if you try and get full 500 megahertz on all four channels, uh, you know it's gonna be down to one gig samples per second.

Yeah, okay, you meet the Nyquist uh, sampling rate. but you know, apart from that, it's not going to really do you any good so you know you can't. It doesn't really cut it as a real high performance 500 megahertz scope. It's pretty much as it says, an entry level type scope.

Bit disappointed with the two millivolts up per division. Vertical range is hoping to go down to one millivolt and the other big thing going for it is it's super quick to power on. It's just five seconds. Yes, look at that.

Fantastic. That's what we want to see. So initial first impressions: Verdict: I don't know. it's probably a thumbs sideways, but uh, you know it's price is cheap.

so I guess you know if you're buying an entry level cheap 500 Meg scope? Yeah, you know you get what you pay for. So yeah, there's just not a huge amount to differentiate this. uh scope. Really bottom of the range? You know when you're spending that sort of, you know, five grand.

You want something with the bells and whistles and this thing just doesn't really have the bells and whistles. It looks a bit boring and bland too. I don't know. But anyway, it is small, compact, but build quality on it.

You know it seems just fine. You know it's a big name. Uh, Lacroix Teledon, Lacroix. You know they're going to stand by it.

So like long term it's going to be a pretty reliable scope I suspect. So thanks to Lacroix for sending this one in. I'll also have a teardown of this puppy as well, which I'll also uh, link in so you can check out what's inside and what makes it tick. So uh, if you enjoyed it, please give it a big thumbs up on Youtube.

Well look at that black, look at that. Oh man. the exposure compensation. ah, camera doesn't like it at all.

doesn't help with my pasty white skin against the pure black. I don't know. Let me know if you like the black. Catch you next time you.