Basic triggers ?? Are you kidding me.
No, I'm not. You got:
- Edge
- Logic
- Pulse (includes glitch, runt, width, slew rate)
- Video (PAL/SECAM/NTSC, FlexFormat) if you've got Option 05
That's it.
Even back then that wasn't exactly earth shattering. Other scopes also gave you exclusion trigger, droput triggers, interval trigger and so on.
It's got "InstaVu" which at the time put it way ahead of the competition in catching infrequent events such as runt pulses, glitches setup and hold time violations. Way ahead of its time which saw Agilent and Lecroy desperately trying to play catch-up.
I'm sorry but that is nonsense. When your TDS came out HP already had its own high waveform rate architecture (MegaZoom) on the market - faster, fully automatic, and without the drawbacks of Tek's InstaVu mode (like the lack of measurements). What's really sad is that the same limitations are even found on modern Tek scopes like the MDO3k Series, which just shows how stale their technology is.
LeCroy back then already had the 9300 Series, which was vastly more powerful than any DSO Tek came up with. Like any high end scope it lacked the high waveform rates but its advanced SmartTriggers made more than up for that. Plus you got more memory (like, a lot), and what were back then the most advanced maths and analysis tools on the market. End of 1996 they then came up with the LC Series, up to 1.5Ghz and 8GSa/s plus an even more powerful architecture, plus an extension of the already very long list of available options.
There wasn't anything in the TDS Series which HP or LeCroy were "desperate to catch up" to - that's really jutst wishful thinking on your part.
Sure it doesn't have lots of the bells and whistles you get in modern scopes that most will probably never use but then this was a scope of the time and still is relevant in many ways.
Well, it also lacked many of the features you got in scopes from other brands at the time. Which pretty much contradicts your "far ahead of the competition" statement.
My Hantek has got lots of these bells and whistles
Actually, it doesn't. Hantek's scopes are as basic as it can get, really. Just have a look at the current crop of entry-level scopes, like the GW Instek GDS-2000E, or even the Rigol scopes.
Your siglent won't be-able to be used to diagnose problems with high speed memory timing because it just aint got the bandwidth.
Not sure what you're talking about as I don't own any Siglent scopes.
Anyways, as someone who has used the TDS Series as well as the various HP scopes extensively back then when they were current I can assure you that the TDS784A was in no way "ahead of the competition". It was a good scope, aimed at engineers converting from analog scopes, but nothing extraordinary.
Look, I know that coming from a Hantek a TDS700 must look like a tool from another planet, but if you think that back then it was extraordinary you're deluding yourself.
Tek's problem was and still is that they saw the DSO as another form of the analog scope, while HP and especially LeCroy understood that the benefit of the digital scopes lies in its analysis capabilities. Tek never made that switch, and this, reflected in their portfolio of lacklustre products, is the reason why they are trailing the big brands and increasingly also the B-brands.