Pico Technology believes it has the fastest USB instrument on the market. The new PicoScope 3000 series offers a fast streaming mode that allows transfer rates of more than six million samples per second, bypassing the oscilloscope hardware's memory buffer and transferring data direct to the PC. Previously, the only way to sample at high speed was to use 'block mode', which resulted in lost data due to the dead time between blocks. The new streaming mode uses high-efficiency USB 2.0 data transfers to capture data continuously without dead time.