Dave,
We certainly encourage techs to do their homework when looking for a scope.
First of all, the comparison chart you link to is outdated. The PicoScope 3423 isn't even available anymore and has been replaced by the 4000 series.
The EScope does have a lot of interesting features. I don't like the way they clutter up the screen with all the controls and leave little for the scope display, but that's just my opinion.
What's not an opinion is the raw scope capability...
As for the scope capability, it would be suitable for some, maybe even most basic automotive tasks but it's too slow to do a lot of things. Depends on which EScope you are looking at, but let's consider the most powerful one The EScope Pro:
It has a single 1MHz ADC that would be divided by the number of channels in use. This means that you would really only be able to look at secondary with one channel at maximum speed and get the detail, if you consider that 1mHz real time sample rate is needed for secondary. In any case, no matter what you did, you would never be able to look at 500KHz CAN much less high speed CAN or Flex Ray communication.
The EScope limited can only achieve 48KHz max speed, which is also divided my the number of active channels. This makes it pretty useless for all but the most basic automotive signals.
The neat features don't mean much if the power is just not there.
Also on the chart is a 4 million point buffer on the EScope Pro. That's very good.
But consider the PicoScope 4423 with dual 80MHz ADCs and 32 million point internal buffer and over 80 million when streaming to PC RAM.
That's like racing a VW bug against a Masarati. Just no comparison.
As for the dual time base thing....Really irrelevant and unnecessary with a Pico because you can have two signals of very different frequencies on the same screen and see all the detail in both. There is no need for a dual time base. It sounds neat though. Unfortunately, you would lose the signal relationships if you are doing dual time base. Much better to do on one screen where the signals are related in time.
Yes, the EScope is 16 bit but I don't consider that a leg up. 12 bits is plenty of vertical resolution, 16 bits does not make it better for automotive. Where it lacks is in horizontal resolution....samples per second.
So, it really depends on what you are going to do with a scope how much power you need. Many, I'm sure, would be quite satisfied with the EScope. It's better than a lot of them out there so you could sure do a lot worse.
I'm sure if I have mane any factual misstatements here someone will correct me.