Question of the Month: How often do you use a Handheld Oscilloscope?

Some pros and cons for hand-held scopes:

Hand-held Pros

• Portable - can be used in mobile applications
• Isolated - useful when you don't want the instrument grounded to mains ground
• Small - useful in setups where there is little space for instrumentation
• Video framing - can be used in images and videos of apparatus where you need to show the scope display without it dominating the image area

Hand-held Cons

• Not high performance - limited bandwidth, limited resolution, limited accuracy, limited voltage
• Cramped, non-standard controls
• Small cables, connectors and probes that may have limited performance and can be pretty flimsy
• Small low-res screen - hard to see some signal features
• Poor triggering
• Few channels
• Batteries die

USB scope Pros

• Save on the cost of a display (if you have a host computer already)
• Can have a nice display with extensive processing capabilities

USB scope Cons

• Slow boot
• Limited performance
• Non-standard controls
• More cables
• Can take a lot of space to place the host computer

I'm sure members can add more pros and cons in the comments below.

Some pros and cons for hand-held scopes:

Hand-held Pros

• Portable - can be used in mobile applications
• Isolated - useful when you don't want the instrument grounded to mains ground
• Small - useful in setups where there is little space for instrumentation
• Video framing - can be used in images and videos of apparatus where you need to show the scope display without it dominating the image area

Hand-held Cons

• Not high performance - limited bandwidth, limited resolution, limited accuracy, limited voltage
• Cramped, non-standard controls
• Small cables, connectors and probes that may have limited performance and can be pretty flimsy
• Small low-res screen - hard to see some signal features
• Poor triggering
• Few channels
• Batteries die

USB scope Pros

• Save on the cost of a display (if you have a host computer already)
• Can have a nice display with extensive processing capabilities

USB scope Cons

• Slow boot
• Limited performance
• Non-standard controls
• More cables
• Can take a lot of space to place the host computer

I'm sure members can add more pros and cons in the comments below.

This may only apply to the lower end of the market, but...

One feature of the USB scope I particularly like is the 'panoramic' width of the waveform display.

You can display the whole capture and still be able to read the text on the protocol decoding overlay. Hit the 'print screen' and you have a copy of it stored for later.

On the bench scope, by the time you are zoomed in enough to read the decoding, then you have to pan back and forth to see the rest of the captured waveform. The screen capture option tends to limit you to a copy of the current viewport and not of the the whole capture. So you have to pan, screen capture, pan, screen capture, pan, screen capture... then download and stitch the individual images back together.