Hantek 2D72 vs. OWON HD272S – Which Scopemeter is Better?

hi as promised i'm going to do a side-by-side comparison between the hentac 2d72 and the 01 hds 272s in this video just a quick refresher the handtech 2d72 and the 01 hds 272s are both three in one devices that contain a digital oscilloscope a multimeter and an arbitrary waveform generator i did a few detailed review and teardown videos for each of them over the last couple months and for those who have not seen those videos i'd recommend you watch those videos first so that you can relate to the comparisons i'm doing in this video as you know the handtech 2d72 and the 01 hds 272s are competing directly against each other so naturally we wanted to see which one offers the better bang for the buck and my goal is for you to be able to decide which one is more suitable for your needs after watching this video currently you can get either one of these from banggood and they are priced very similarly at the moment the handtech 2d72 can be had for just under 170 and the o1 hds 272s is on sale for just above 180 the hds-272s is slightly more expensive but the specs for the o1 is better compared to the handtech 2d72 in almost every way i printed out this chart so we can see exactly how the specs compare with each other at least on paper since the one is generally better expect i only highlighted items where the hand tech 2d72 are doing better the first thing you will see is that the spec oscilloscope bandwidth both are at 70 megahertz and the sample rate are also spec similarly they are at 250 mega samples per second for a single channel and 125 meg samples per second for dual channel operation the refresh rate is not specified for the hand tech 2d72 but is specified at 10 000 waveforms per second which is actually very very good for the old one and if you look at the lcd the included lcd for the 2d72 is a 2.8 inch one and the o11 is actually slightly larger at 3.5 inch both of these support a resolution of 320 320x240 the remaining two categories for the oscilloscope actually expect slightly better for the 2d72 as you can see that the low frequency response goes below 10 hertz whereas the o1 goes slightly above 10 hertz now i don't think there's any material differences here but nevertheless on paper at least the handtag 2d72 looks a little bit better and also for the trigger accuracy you can see that the trigger accuracy level for the hand tag is at the 0.2 division whereas for the o1 it is at 0.3 division so it's slightly worse than hand tech now the o1 does come with a probe test signal whereas the handtag does not and now let's take a look at the multimeter ratings here for the multimeter there's really not a whole lot of comparison going on as these two are totally different class multimeters for instance the 2d72 is a cad 2 rated 4 000 counts none to our mass meter whereas the o1 is a cat 3 rated 20 000 counts true rms meter you will see that the o1 compared to the hand tag is pretty much better in every single way here so for the ac and dc voltage measurement you will see that the bandwidth for the hand tag is 40 to 400 hertz whereas for the o1 is 40 all the way up to 1000 hertz and the maximum voltage can be measured is rated slightly higher which is not a surprise because the o1 is a cat 3 meter and for the current measurement mode if you look at it the o1 also is expect a lot better than the hand tag which is not surprising given its higher counts for the 10 amp measurement range there is a key difference between these two meters for the hand tag it is not fused whereas for the o1 it is properly fused and for the resistance capacitance measurement mode the o1 also does a lot better than the handtech 2d72 which is somewhat to be expected given that it has a much capable dmm chipset but if you look at the resistance measurement range here we are topped at a 40 mega ohm for the 2d72 whereas for the o1 we can measure up to one gig ohms now for capacitance actually neither of these are great you can see that for 2d72 the maximum measurable capacitance is about 100 microfarad whereas 401 is about 2000 microfarad now in terms of the diode measurement mode for the hand tech the output voltage is slightly lower than the output voltage for o1 for the o1 is 0 to 2 volts whereas the hand tag is 0 to 1 volt now onto the arbitrary waveform generator if you take a look at here you will see that the key difference between these two are the resolution of the deck so for the handheld 2d72 they're using a 12-bit deck whereas for the o1 they're using a 14-bit deck so that clearly is an upgrade compared to the handtag 2d72 and associated benefit is also the longer sample depth if you take a look at the o1 it's specified at the 8k sample whereas for the hand tech 2d72 the waveform depth is only at 512 samples and because of the deck difference we also see that in the frequency resolution for the o1 is actually 10 times better than the hand tech now of course the hand tech 2d72 does have some advantage in terms of its arbitrary waveform generator here so if you look at the highlighted items here the square wave output is specified as up to 10 megahertz whereas the o1 it is only going up to 5 megahertz so you know depends on what your application is that could be significant and for the sampling rate also the 2d72 is specified at 250 mega samples per second actually that is extremely fast as i mentioned earlier that is actually faster than the 960 ue from unity but for the o1 the maximum sample rate is at 125 mega samples per second which is only half of the sampling rate for the 2d72 of course all these actual performance for the o1 hds272s doesn't come for free as you can see that in the power consumption here for the hand tag we're consuming less than 2.5 watts whereas for the o1 it almost doubled that and the battery capacity on the hand tag is actually slightly better than the one so given this i'd expect the battery in the 2d72 last significantly longer than the o1 hds 272s dimension wise these two units are almost exactly the same size with the hand tag 2d72 being ever so slightly larger than the 01 hds 272s and if you hold these two devices in your hand you will feel that the hand tag feels a little bit sturdier than the old one as the hand tag does have a rubberized holster on the outside and you can remove that whereas the old one everything is built in and it is soft material on outside but it does not feel as sturdy as the hand tank the first thing i want to do comparison now are the power consumptions of these meters and to test that i'm setting the emerald power supply back there at 4.2 volts output so right now what you're seeing here is measuring the standby current of this handtag to d72 as you can see it is reading at 1.3 milliamp and usually you want your standby current to be as small as possible and at 1.3 milliamp it is certainly not that small for the handtag 2d72 you have two of these 2.6 amp power batteries and doing some backup envelope calculation you will see that it takes roughly 4000 hours to fully discharge a fully charged battery and that translates into 166 days which is not that great it's just shy of a half a year so just something to keep in mind if you do intend to store this scope for a long period of time before using you might want to double check the battery situation before using it and now let me power it on so for that i'm going to change it to the amp mode and i'm going to switch it to the amp range because the current drill is significantly higher and one thing interesting is whenever you disconnect the battery and reconnect the battery the meter actually automatically powers on instead of staying in the off mode that's just something to remember and you can see that in the oscilloscope mode we're joined about 310 milliamps so that translates into about 16 hours actually almost 17 hours of continuous work time using this 2d72 and now actually i just pressed a few buttons and then notice that even when i go back to the oscilloscope mode even though everything else stayed the same the current increased to about 340 milliamps so basically that 310 milliamps i think i was measuring before was the absolute minimum current draw for the oscilloscope mode now i'm curious to see if i switch to different modes to see if the current draw changes so for the dmm and we're joined actually a little bit more but it's 350-ish 360-ish milliamps and now let's go to awg so let me enable the output and you can see that as soon as we enable the arbitrary waveform generator the current jaw increases to about 450 milliamps so that is good to know so now we know that the general current consumption range is between 300 and 450 ish milliamps for this hand tag so now let's move on to the o1 now we're measuring the standby current of the o1 hds to 72s and you can see we're only drawing about 1780 microamps that is actually excellent so now let me change it to the amp range so we can measure the power on current and let me turn it back over here so we can power it on and as we expected earlier the power on current is significantly higher than the 2d72 which right now is at 650 milliamps and according to the spec sheet the included battery is actually lower capacity compared to that in the hentai 2d72 so these are 2200 milliamp hours compared to the 26 milliamp hours so did some backup of the envelope calculation that translates into roughly less than seven hours of continuous use if you are using a fully charged set of batteries in this one and now let me switch to different modes to see if the current consumption changes so the multimeter mode is roughly the same a little bit higher and let's change it to the arbitrary waveform generator mode let me enable the arbitrary waveform and on this l1 it doesn't appear that the current changes that dramatically in different modes so we do observe a little bit higher current consumption but that's just a little bit higher from the side you can see these two units are roughly the same size as well and one thing i mentioned during the review of the hentai 2d72 is how far recessed that usb c port is if you take a closer look you can probably see the usb c port and here is a standard cable you can see that i can insert it all the way in now that is seated correctly so some viewers commented that this actually design is better because if you accidentally say knocked on the side of the cable it will not cause physical damage to the port due to the actual depth i think there could be some truth to that now if you take a look at the same port for the o1 hds 272s you will see that this port is actually right here is almost flush with the side of the case here so there's no problem plugging any usb-c tables you also notice that on the handtech hds272s we have the probe compensation output right on the side here whereas on that handtag 2d72 we do not have the probe compensation output now let's take a quick look at the power on performance of these two meters and it appears that o1 hds272 powers on almost instantaneously whereas for the handtag 2d72 it took a little bit of time approximately two seconds to power up now let's take a look at powering off and it appears now is the opposite so for the hand tag it powered off immediately whereas for the o1 i did have to hold the power button for about two seconds for it to power off so the performance here are quite comparable and one has some advantage here with this fast power on performance and now let's take a quick look at the subjective update rate that we can observe between these two oscilloscopes and for that i connected the inputs of this oscilloscope channel one together and i'm going to hook up a very noisy power supply and right now the power supply is powered off but you can see that the update rate on these two scopes are drastically different with the hds272s updating a lot faster than the handtag 2d72 the setting of these two scopes right now are identical you can see that the channel one is set at one volt per division here is one volt per division and the time base is at one micro second and here is also one micro second and if i just turn on the power supply you will see both of these baselines going to jump to the voltage reading and you can see that they jump about the same way because these settings are the same but the detected waveforms are different with the hds272s we can see more rapid changes on this scope and for the next test i'm going to compare the acquisition speed of these two scopes and also try to see the behavior of the scope when we're approaching the bandwidth limit right now i'm inputting a 50 megahertz signal 0 dbm from my hp 8642b signal generator and the input of these channels are connected so they're both showing the same signal now let me automatically acquire the signal and you can see for the hand tag it took about five seconds to acquire that signal let's try the same for the old one it only took about a second and a half even though we mentioned earlier in the review that for whatever reason the amplitude does not get automatically set correctly on o1 a lot of times so let me manually set the o1 up so now these two signals are identical the first thing you will notice is that the signal on the hand tag is a little bit of unstable it wobbles a little bit back and forth but the trace itself is very thin and crisp whereas on o1 the whole signal appears to be very stable but i suspect it's because of this fast update rate that the signal does ever so slightly shift back and forth so that translates into this thickened waveform plot as you can see on the screen here and now i just turned on the on-screen measurement as well so you can see what is being measured right now the input signal is sitting at 50 megahertz so what i'm going to do is gradually increase the input signal and let's observe what a waveform looks like on each of these oscilloscopes and also let's see at what point we are not able to measure that input signal anymore so let's turn on to let's see 60 megahertz and no problem at all even though on this one the amplitude dropped quite a bit now i would not worry too much about that because right now we're essentially a 50 ohm terminated system here so that could add some of these discrepancies we see here and let's just concentrate on that signal itself so let's turn go to 70 at 70 macros and we have no problem measuring that here no problem measurement here so now let's keep increasing let's change it to 80 megahertz and you can see both of the scopes have no problem displaying the waveform and also measuring the waveform itself now let's do ad5 and you can see that on o1 which we also observed that during our review the maximum frequency you can measure is actually at 80 megahertz so i believe that is something that limited by the hardware itself whereas for the hand tag we can still measure that waveform at 85 megahertz right now so let's keep increasing 90 meters no problem and now it's a 100 megahertz as you can see the old one actually not only does worse in terms of the measured signal we have a lot of distortions and we are also not able to measure it so let's auto require on the hand tag and see what we got so you can see that we are able to acquire the signal also we are able to measure that signal and that in my opinion actually the display here is a little bit better than the ol although from the wobbling of the signal essentially expands to the same shape but at any given moment you can see the signal more clearly here so let me increase it to 110. you can see we still can't measure it with no problem although the waveform significantly get distorted because we have essentially very limited sampling rate here and we're approaching that two samples per waveform limit already so let's do 120 and you know obviously this is beyond what can be actually properly measured by the oscilloscope but nevertheless you can see we still have that hardware counter frequency relatively in the same accurate range whereas for the old one that just totally dropped out long time ago next let's compare how these scopes handle the modulated signals for that i'm putting in a one megahertz carrier with a 100 kilohertz amplitude modulated signal on top of that the modulation depth is at 100 so now let me automatically acquire the signal and now let's adjust the time base so we can see the signal a little bit better and let's try to change the trigger level so as you can see we're struggling triggering on this signal but this is probably as stable as we can get on the hand tag of course we can change the time base a little bit so now let's do the same thing on the o1 so let's see time base and you can see we are actually getting some artifacts depends on the time base that we're currently at so let's first change the trigger level so that we can make sure we can trigger that signal very very cleanly and we can change the time base again and you can see that the signal is traced very cleanly and there's no jitter back and forth now we're looking at a frequency modulated signal this time is a one megahertz carrier frequency with the modulation frequency of 30 kilohertz and the frequency deviation is 100 kilohertz so again let me automatically acquire the signal and again as you can see how fast the o1 does its job whereas the hand tag is still working again both of the scopes acquire signal with no problem but notice that hand tag actually automatically set the time base to 200 nanoseconds whereas the o1 is at 500 nanoseconds so let me increase the time base on the hand tag to match that on o1 you'll notice that the displayed signals look slightly different this is because the handtag has a slower update rate whereas the o1 has much faster update rate nevertheless both of the scopes are able to display this frequency modulated signal although i prefer the o1 display a lot better as you can clearly see the frequency modulation on top of the carrier whereas on the hand tag you can see that the signal is moving back and forth that's due to the slow refresh rate but nevertheless you get a sense that the signal is being frequency modulated of course the one has a much larger display 3.5 versus 2.8 that makes it a lot easier to see the waveforms on the old one and now let's compare the xy mode performance of these two oscilloscopes and for that i'm using my unity utg962e to generate two sinusoidals putting into both channel one and channel two simultaneously so that i can generate a resistor pattern right now the input signal from both channels are 5 kilohertz at 3 volts p to peak and i'm going to change the frequency of channel 1 so we can see the patterns are changing you can see that the update rate of the hand tag is not that great as at five kilohertz the frequency is fast enough so we shouldn't see this kind of uh animated effects and we should just see the pattern changing instantaneously but that's clearly not we see and we can change the patterns here but nevertheless it represents that elizabeth pattern with no problems and this certainly is a better digital oscilloscope compared to a lot of the ones i have seen where they are unable to generate any meaningful residual pattern when you are using the xy mode so this clearly is not bad at all so now let's take a look at the similar patterns on the o1 hds 272s and right now the signal from the knight 62e goes directly into the o1 hds 272s as you can see the pattern right now being generated again i'm going to change the frequency of channel 1 and you see that how instantaneous that pattern changes and this is actually almost as good as any analog oscilloscope and it's certainly a lot better than most of the digital scopes i see in this price range and even the more expensive ones so this implementation is actually fantastic and just to show you how impressive this really is right now i have the frequency set up to be five megahertz on each of the output channels so you can see that we still have a very decent shape there and even i adjust the output frequency you can still see the lesser rule pattern very well captured on the scope so this is really amazing and the same cannot be said for the hand tech 2d72 for the same 5 megahertz signal i'm putting in and you can see that we cannot capture the actual shape just because the sampling is not fast enough next i want to take a quick look at the multimeter functionality of these two meters i'm not going to spend too much time comparing these meters as these are different class meters the o1 is a twenty thousand pounds multimeter whereas the handtag is a four thousand counts multimeter so any direct comparisons would be pretty much meaningless but i do wanna point out a few things that i think the o1 implemented better than on the hand tag one thing is the update rate you can see that the readings on the one up is about three times per second whereas on the hand tag it updates around two times per second so clearly the faster the update rate the better it is one area i think the o1 did better is the inclusion of this rail button a lot of the times when you are measuring for instance you are measuring the resistance or capacitance for that matter if you wanted to rail out the actual readings for this hand tag there's no way for you to rail out that residual reading whereas for the o1 you can just press the button in fact not just the capacitance range but also any range that you want to measure for example ohm range you can also even though it's very slow but you can route out the readings and then when you are measuring a resistor it will show the true reading of that resistor although the o1 meter has a much higher count than the hand tech the performance is not that great especially in the old measurement you can see that it's really slow if i short the leads it takes a good four seconds for the readings to register whereas for the hand tag is pretty normal at least compared to a regular multimeter here so that is something just to notice that you wouldn't want to use it for your everyday measurement and forgot to mention that the o1 is a true rms meter whereas the hand tag is not and let's uh take a look at continuity so for the continuity mode the o1 is latched whereas the hand tag is not so it is a little bit scratchy as you can see here but again in a pinch you can use either meter to do all sorts of measurements as you would with the traditional multimeter with no problem and the last thing i want to comment on are these input jacks if you take a look at the o1 meter here and i can pretty much use any standard input leads into these jacks so for example this one is the one from unity and i can plug it in with no problem whereas for the hand tag actually because it has a solid end so for that i actually cannot put in this uh unity leads in all the way you can see that so that is something to keep in mind now that it would matter most of the time now let's move on to the arbitrary waveform generator and if you recall from our spec discussion a little bit earlier that both of these units are capable of generating roughly up to 25 megahertz of signal and they have pretty comparable specs here as well of course the o1 hds 272s has a much better resolution deck at 14 bits versus the 12 bit that we had in the 2d72 and it supports more sample points per waveform from the user interface perspective that the o1 comes a little bit more modern whereas for the hand tech it's a little bit of a old fashion but the handheld one i do like one thing is you double click on a specific parameter you can use a keypad to input exactly what you want whereas for the o1 you have to use these kind of arrow buttons to set each individual digit and use it up and down to dial in the specific number you're looking for i think either way it works but i prefer the hand tech way of a more direct input in terms of the maximum output range these two meters are actually very comparable now it might cause some confusion as how these parameters are specified if you take a look at hand tag it says right now the amplitude is 2.5 volts whereas right now out of default the hds272s is showing as a amplitude of 5 volts peak to peak now the 2.5 volts is really from the zero dc line to the top of the signal here so these two signals right now are actually identical so i'll show you that you can see that from the scope behind and if i plug the scene you can see this is the one from handtap and the second signal is from the o1 so these are indeed identical signals as i mentioned in the hand tech 2d72 review that the square wave generation has some issues as you can see that on the scope back there that at 20 megahertz the waveform actually does not maintain the same width so not sure why it's oscillating every half a second and i do hope that is a firmware issue that can be addressed by hand tech but the maximum frequency for the hand tag is at 10 megahertz whereas o1 is at 5 macros so let's take a look at the waveform generated by o1 so right now we're outputting a 5 megahertz signal from o1 and you can see that the signal is very stable and very clean now a quick look at the output spectral purity for that i'm outputting a 25 megahertz signal right now it's from the handtag 2d72 to the spectral analyzer and the analyzer currently is set to sweep between 10 megahertz and 50 megahertz and let me zoom in to the special analyzer so you can see it a little bit better and you can see that the signal from the hand tag is relatively clean we do have some experience here and there and some of the harmonics at the higher orders but besides that the general signal is pretty clean so let's swap this out to our o1 signal and we can see what that signal looks like again o1 is set up in pretty much the same way i'll put in a 25 megahertz signal and right now you can see though we do have a more pronounced serious signals here so clearly those are just some of the artifacts from the synthesizer but regardless the signal output are pretty comparable so that is from the signal sitting at a five volts p to peak output amplitude if i reduce that amplitude you will see that the distortion also is significantly reduced right now i am sitting at one volt speed to peak and all the things can see are these harmonics and the distortions are gone so this tells me that the output amp of the o1 hds 272s may not be as good as the one in the handheld 2d72 and just for comparison let me switch back to the hand tag so now we're looking at the hand tech output signal currently the amplitude is also sitting at five volt speed repeat and let me start reducing that amplitude and we'll see that the signal gets a lot cleaner in fact when we are at the same let me just see if i can go to one volts p2p so let me just bear with me here here at one volt peak to each actually all the spurious signal and the harmonics are gone so the output amp and the filtering circuitry is doing a great job in that 2d72 so in conclusion except for a few areas the o1 hd s272s is superior in almost every way compared to the handtech 2d72 this is especially true for the oscilloscope mode the waveform refresh rate on o1 hds 272 s is just phenomenal and it is likely one of the best in entry level oscilloscope market and the xy mode performance is also one of the best i have seen in a digital oscilloscope even including ones that cost several times more also the waveform stability is much better on the o1 compared to that on the hand tag for the multimeter functionality there isn't really too much comparison between these two devices as the hds272s is a 20 thousand counts 2rms multimeter whereas the handtech 2d72 only offers 4000 pounds and it's not true rms and the accuracy for o1 is also much better compared to the hand tech as well but neither of these meters are speedy by any means in my opinion though the multimeter performance shouldn't be weighed as much towards your purchasing decision as you probably wouldn't use this device solely as your only multimeter on a day-to-day basis and to be honest either of these multimeters would get you by just fine in a pinch for more serious measurement you will probably want to use a dedicated multimeter anyway finally onto the arbitrary waveform generator functionality this is where your decision could be swayed one way or the other depending on your needs on paper the o1 is mostly superior compared to the hand tag as it has better resolution 14 bit versus 12 bit stack longer waveform depth 8 000 sample points versus 512 samples and a finer frequency resolution given the battery deck used but the lack of a computer software for creating your own arbitrary waveform could be a deal breaker for folks that need specific waveform that is not included already on the scope and the included pc software is much better for the hand tag than the old one so if you need to create your own arbitrary waveforms you can only do that with the hand tech 2d72 at the moment i'm hoping one would release a software update that allows the creation of arbitrary waveforms as the hardware is more than capable the handtech 2d72 is also less power hungry compared to the o1 hds 272s and the estimated runtime per charge for the handtag is two or three times better compared to the o1 so this could be important if you are mainly using the device in the field so i hope this video gives you enough information for you to decide which one better suits your need i hope you enjoyed the video and if you liked the video please remember to give it big thumbs up and remember to share and subscribe to the channel so you won't miss out more videos like this in the future i will catch up with you next time

Channel: Kerry Wong

Views: 22,340

Keywords: Hantek, OWON, Hantek 2000, 2D72, 2D42, HDS200, HDS272S, HDS242S, Modulation, Spectrum, Oscilloscope, DMM, AWG, Scopemeter, Comparison

Id: DTC1h2PWC8g

Length: 37min 46sec (2266 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 25 2021