Well, the 8845a arrived and I am pretty disappointed. It will be going back.
I think the display is its Achilles' heel. It isn't very bright even on its brightest setting - they probably have tweaked this in the firmware over the years in an attempt to make it last longer, but the display quality really is terrible. Even on its bootup message there are obvious pixels and rows that are brighter than others. I've never been a huge fan of graphic VFD's, but I am less so now. I get the feeling that VFD is much better suited to segments than it is dots.
I am also disappointed with the way they implemented the display in firmware. The main display has nice large digits, but anytime you get to any specialized display you end up with the same sized characters laid out in monospace font. A good example might be how good the min/max/avg looks in my Fluke 289 vs. how terrible it looks on the 8845A. Also, the flickery blinking is the result of poor screen implementation code in the firmware. There is no reason for an instrument of this class with a super fast VFD to clear the screen and repaint it with such a delay that the user sees it flickering when going between functions.
The display is my biggest gripe honestly, but it runs pretty warm when on for awhile and I hear an odd 1 Hz ticking sort of sound coming from it as well.
The positives are that it seems to go up to 1 Mhz frequency even though it was supposed to only go to 300 kHz, given the sheet that arrived with it, it seems to be calibrated very well, the trendplot is cool, and it looks like its management features are very solid though I did not test them. It does come with the cable (rs232-usb) which surprised me as I thought only the SU version came with that.
I'm going to save my $$$ and get a 34461A some day instead.