I actually prefer the USB scopes. I paid a lot for a high resolution laptop display, and I'm going to have that with me anyway.
At work, I'm generally okay with a 400-500 MHz bandwidth for some of the more fiddly stuff. At home, 100 MHz is usually plenty, although I've occasionally had to take parts of my projects to the lab.
I'll concede that many hobbyists don't really need all of this capability (e.g. the Arduino + LED crowd), but I'd have a really hard time recommending a scope that doesn't do at least 100 MHz simply because you can already get 100 MHz hardware for dirt cheap.
It's gotten significantly easier for hobbyists to play with relatively high-end hardware that would have been out of reach a decade ago (FPGAs, fast memory, wired/wireless communication ICs, cameras, etc). A lot of this hardware requires relatively high bandwidth interconnects to work well (or to work at all), but today's hobbyists seem undeterred and are figuring out how to make it work.
But when the shit hits the fan, you don't want to be banging your head against the wall because of crappy test hardware.
At work, I'm generally okay with a 400-500 MHz bandwidth for some of the more fiddly stuff. At home, 100 MHz is usually plenty, although I've occasionally had to take parts of my projects to the lab.
I'll concede that many hobbyists don't really need all of this capability (e.g. the Arduino + LED crowd), but I'd have a really hard time recommending a scope that doesn't do at least 100 MHz simply because you can already get 100 MHz hardware for dirt cheap.
It's gotten significantly easier for hobbyists to play with relatively high-end hardware that would have been out of reach a decade ago (FPGAs, fast memory, wired/wireless communication ICs, cameras, etc). A lot of this hardware requires relatively high bandwidth interconnects to work well (or to work at all), but today's hobbyists seem undeterred and are figuring out how to make it work.
But when the shit hits the fan, you don't want to be banging your head against the wall because of crappy test hardware.