To be fair the early “light weight” digital units (TDS200) were fairly groundbreaking when they came out. They had no fan, decent display, weighed bugger all, we’re pretty cheap and had enough functionality to tick most basic boxes. When your other option was to drag a 546xx around it was a good proposition.
The key take home though is it ain’t a megazoom.
Anyway I’ve got this TBS1000 turning up this week sometime. Should be interesting to play with. We have another thread going reverse engineering the firmware at the moment. It runs Linux on ARM . Wait for the cease and desist from Fortive
Edit: also for those who never experienced this hell, the first 546xx’s were somewhat unreliable and fragile bits of kit. It took HP a good year to get on top of that and they never solved the fragility issues.
And then all the surface mount tants let loose and turned them into trash.
Naaahhh... by then, the lessons learnt from Tek running tants too close to limits were common knowledge and for the most part they designed with more than enough headroom.
As for fragile... take bd's words with a huge grain of salt; my late-production 54645A survived a dragon-butt assault. Yes it suffered some cosmetic damage to the plastic; but think what any hollow-state Tek would look like after getting tipped upside-down onto its face from bench height.
Also... I take exception to the "decent LCD" comment re: the TDS2
x0... they were only "decent" compared to a ScopeMeter and its Gameboy-reject creamed-spinach LCD.
By any objective standards they were horrible, both resolution and contrast-wise, and
most of the time I would rather carry my 54645A rather than put up with that shit LCD on almost any day. Those TDS2
x0s are a heavy little bitch for their size, and the 54645A is a very light CRO, as the tube is really just a 1000-line mono monitor.
Honestly, I'd bet the difference in weight is a pound or so... just the 54645A comes in a bigger box, which is fine by me given the much better screen.
mnem