An automated sphygmo-manometer which digitizes the pressure transducer output with sufficient resolution to preserve the details of the measured oscillation complexes. The "composite" arterial pulse signal containing the DC pressure component and the oscillation complexes is processed in a single processing channel so that the amplitudes of the oscillation pulse can be measured in the presence of the static components. Any necessary filtering is performed in the digital domain using known digital signal processing (DSP) techniques. In addition, dither signals may be added to the arterial pulse signal in the single processing channel in order to increase the apparent resolution. A simple finite impulse response (FIR) filter is used to sum respective samples to form high resolution samples from a plurality of low resolution samples. The FIR filter has zero crossings at the summing frequencies for the dither signal so as to eliminate the dither signal from the high resolution sum signal prior to determining the blood pressure from the composite signal using pulse separation and blood pressure calculation software.