Advice on buying an o-scope

[The Tektronics 466 shown here]

On the Reddit forums, there’s an interesting discussion going on about buying oscilloscopes:

If you need to track the position of edges down into the nanoseconds you might appreciate watching Ebay for the Tektronics 2465. Broken ones sell for a couple hundred bucks, and if you decide to fix one look for one that has any other problem than a blown preamplifier, which are expensive modules that fail because of inadequate cooling, just because technicians can’t manage to keep the air inlets on the cabinet free of dust. If you don’t anticipate working on anything that fast or aren’t so into the project of getting serious horsepower for dirt the 465 is a great old 100Mhz workhorse that can occasionally be had for 50 bucks working but it is only 2 channel. If all you want to do is look at a bunch of slower changing signals you might do better with the plethora of PC interface devices available now, with all their software bells and whistles, but digitizing scopes that are fast are still quite expensive.

Oscilloscope recommendation [via Serge on the HacDC elist]