https://info.tek.com/rs/584-WPH-840/images/en-Tektronix-New-Scope-Sweepstakes-Rules_May-2019.pdf
The Sweepstake rules from the german Tek newsletter is showing a price of 36790USD for the grand price and 24729USD for the first price
Yeah its a bit odd that they'd be giving away a base model, but 24k for an optioned up model with a ton of probes/MSO probes would not be totally unreasonable. For the 5000 rigol scopes, highest end model = about 4x the price of the base model (6x in this case for tek).
Sure...but I'm asking why is that so? Surely the engineering difficulties of a 1 GHz scope are pretty much solved by now. When companies have long since moved on to building ridiculously fast 50 GHz+ real time scopes at the top of their product lines, why is a lowly 1 GHz DSO so expensive still? It seems that the low end stuff that is approachable in price hasn't moved much beyond the bandwidths of old workhorses like the Tek 465/485 and the like, yet the 465/485 were NOT cheap in their day. And digital electronics in particular aren't getting any slower.
I'll give you a real-world hobbyist example: some of my interests are in FPGAs. I can clock designs at 100 MHz, and for small numbers of signals it's handy to be able to look at them on an oscilloscope for debugging. My 7904A CRO mainframe with a 7A19 amplifier and a P6201 FET probe is barely enough to make a good determination of clock integrity at 100 MHz, and that's already at least double the bandwidth of most entry level DSOs.
I guess I'm wondering ultimately, why in this world of VLSI design and such, we can't have an affordable high speed DSO that exceeds the capabilities of huge lab grade equipment of decades past.
- They don't want to eat their market, and undercut themselves. Usually the 1GHz+ tech trickles down, and you want early adopters to pay more up front. Theoretically the Rigol MSO5000 is capable of 500MHz if not 1GHz+ in terms of hardware. Front end not sure. But no way in hell are they going to add those costs in, when they have higher end models to sell.
- Active probes, are you going to sell a 1GHz scope and throw some shitty 350MHz probes in the box? oh wait, tek MSO5000 costs $18k and includes 4 500MHz passive probes
- Probe detect/power connections, traditionally this separates lower from higher end oscilloscopes. As soon as some low end parts start adding it, everyone will consider it (which adds $$$).
- Increased cost of circuit board dielectric (possibly).
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make with the 465, it cost $1700 in 1973 which is about $10,000 today. Can you get a better scope for $10,000 these days? yes.