8 bit Oscilloscopes BITE! But, are they good enough? We compare to 12 bit Oscilloscope #picoscope

In this video '8 bit Oscilliscopes BITE! But, are they good enough? We compare an 8 bit Oscilloscope to an 12 bit Oscilloscope. #OWON, #INSTEK, #GWINSTEK, #PICOSCOPE, #MICSIG

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[jakubczajka]

I have just received new scope three hours ago. 12-bit Owon XDS2102A. First impressions are good. It seems to be well built and display is great. I think 12-14-bit Owons are using Analog Devices HMCAD1520 A/D converter (500u List Price $97.00). 8-bit Owons are using HMCAD1511 (500u List Price $53.76). I also think that some Picos are using these ADCs as well.

[jarlesagheim]

Nice informative video. I learned something today. Thank you for making it.

[ronshaw]

I bought my Owon about 3 years ago because it has 12 bit vertical resolution. Most of what I do is audio, and the 12 bit makes for much better resolution. If all a person does is digital, then 8 bit is fine, but for those that do analog, we want higher resolution.

[khuongathebounga]

Thanks for the tutorial Eddie. You make things so much easier to understand. I would have loved to have a teacher like you when I was still a young lad many, many years ago.

[ricksampson]

The Micsig scopes are used in the Australian Telco industry, cheers Eddie.

[versace]

Hi Eddie, thank you so much for the awesome tutoring. 😁

[jstro-hobbytech]

Depending on slew rate you could measure crossover distortion but not hear it. Jat said that so I tested it and credit to him. I took his word (personal feelings aside) because he knows his stuff but I wanted to see it. Dpi in the display has alot to do with the price. It's why you see the bigger screen because when the dpi is high then a graphical representation of the noise is more accurate.

[Miller]

Maximum possible dynamic range with 8 bit resolution is:

db = 20 X log(2^8 / 1) (The largest binary value, 256 divided by the smallest)

decibels = 20 x common log (base 10) 256/1 = 48.16 db

When CD players came out, sound on the CD had a 96 db dynamic range, let's see why:

They used 16 bit A/D converters to record the music (and 16 bit D/A to play it back)

db = 20 X log (2^16 /1 ) = 20 X log(65, 536) = 96.33 db

Those extra bits make a HUGE difference when you are doing analog work!!

[mitjajan]

Nice explanation and comparison, sir. I have been working on 20MHz NMR spectrometer developing for many years and in the end I find out it's almost all about math. You can easily fit a smal portion of points and get very nice line on the screen. Another question is how about very small superimposed AC signals over very high DC values. Here more bits means a lot. A big trade-off is also that for more vertical bits you need much more computing power, so the sampling rate must be lowered or window narrowed . I'm sure there will be still 8 bit scopes on the market for many years, but maybe not for audio. About 50 years ago HP released audio network analyser 3561 with 13 bit vertical resolution. It was a real beast in that time ;). All the best!

[brianmack]

Isn't it a bit of "horses for courses" ? IIRC there are audio ADCs that sample at 24 bits or even more. But the sample rate max's out around 380ish ksa/sec. Even PC sound cards do 16 bits but at even lower sample rates.
So the user needs to chiose the right tool for that job. That said, I'm all for making 10 bits the new standard for GP O-scopes. Where do I sign the petition? 😅

[cristianstoica]

The more bits the better. But...
From the display output my impression is the software is artificially enhancing the plot more than the additional two or four bits would.
A 10 bit output should have the same jagged display but with four times smaller steps than the 8 bit. However the trace looks interpolated in most of the shots.

The 12 and higher bits resolution are difficult to compare if the smallest scale is still 10mv/div. The higher resolution is useful but smoothing out the trace should be a user defined option

[JDW-]

When you showed the Pico scope, I saw that you're a fellow Mac user. That's reassuring. I had read that some people were unhappy with version 7 and wanted to go back to v6. Are you on an Apple Silicon Mac or Intel? Also, I've love to hear what your "go to scope" is these days. Should everybody move to the USB style PICO, or are there still big advantages in using a traditional scope? THANKS!

[TRONMAGNUM]

8 bits is fine for things like signal checks and troubleshooting most digital circuits. If you want to do Audio Analysis I recommend 12 or higher. Have you ever heard of Virtins Technology? I just found them online. They say their scopes go up to 16bit. For the price it's hard to believe. USB scopes seem the way to go. You get way more for the money since you aren't paying for the cost of a display.

[makerspace]

If the 14bit scopes had a good FFT, it would be great. That would give us 72Db of dynamic range. Great fo audio analysis. Looking at the specs on the XDS3202A, the 14 bits is for bandwidth of 20MHz and below. So I imagine they are getting 14bits not directly, but by oversampling and averaging.

[reverend-dmeow]

Rigol DHO800 & DHO900 series looks promising

[DGDG]

If you want 14 bits vertical capture, you need the Owon SDS3204A and not E (not the same price... one is around 400 $ for 8 bits, the other is around 2000 $ to 14 bits).
I like your videos, it is fine. Thank you for that
PS: i can think about a metaphoric analogy to describe what's important in a oscilloscope... you can compare to a sight binocular zoom clarity and aperture technically to be the depth details you can hope to rich, but quality of lenses is something more and all the price is there... you can not really explain the way people can understand 100% what is it clearly (words not enough), but when you let them look inside a Leica binocular and after that any other cheap one, same zoom (aven same aperture), difference is huge in clear day time, but it is absolutely killer in night or dirty weather time: in the Leica, you still can see perfectly what you want to see, but not in any other one cheap sight binoculars. That is what you also are talking about with signal quality of oscilloscope.

[jessemackenzie]

would reducing the sample rate on the Micsig reduce the blocking? is it a case of oversampleing? Love your videos. I have learned a lot from you . Thanks

[thomasmaughan]

28:55 as you increase the bit resolution, you can see the samples per second dropping rapidly. What is happening is your ADC is still 8 bits; that's what it is, but you are *supersampling* 12 bits is really each measurement sampled 16 times and then averaged to become a single 12 bit sample. In order to take 16 samples at 1 gigasample per second, the effective sample rate is thus 62.5 megasamples per second for 12 bit effective vertical resolution.

For supersampling to work, there needs to be noise in the Least Significant Bit; dithering in other words. If the input was perfectly clean and no noise exists in the scope, all 16 samples would be identical and you'd be right back to 8 bit staircasing despite supersampling. It is the presence of noise that permits, say, 4 of the 16 bit samples to be a "1" and 12 of those samples to be a "0" with the result that this sample is 1/4 of a bit.

ENOB: Effective Number Of Bits.

EDIT: Having just checked data sheets, it seems some ADC's do this internally.

Higher bit depth ADC's simply take longer to decide what exactly is the input voltage.

[waynetoneseekerandersen]

I just saw Rigol came out with 12 bit… I have long thought about owon, but looks cheap to me. I bought GW Instek few years back on your recommendation. It has been great, but for audio, which is my use, I would love to have at least 12 bits.

[bernardm]

Hello. What do you think about the Owon 3204AE vs the newer 12 bit models released by Siglent (for example the SDS824x HD)? Is it still worth considering if found for around the same price?