Even though I worked for years with one of these old HP beasts and loved it at the time, I wouldn't trade it in for my <100€ USB logic analyzer.
The only thing were these old standalones (at least the HP ones) really are superior is the trigger setup. But honestly, most of the time, it's enough to trigger on an edge or simply use no trigger at all and look at the sample buffer.
Besides, the cheap USB LAs usually have a lot of free decoding options, while the old standalones come from a time where there was no USB or even SPI. My HP LA at work could disassemble 8bit opcodes of some obsolete MOS CPU, but what it this good for now?
What I can recommend is e.g. the LAP-C(16032) as you can patch it to the LAP-C(16128). I bought mine for less than 90€, and got 30 protocol decoders for free. Also the GUI has pretty nice features (like counting edges between cursors accessing the sample memory of several scopes. The only drawback is the pretty bad trigger system. More or less only a simple edge trigger.
An even cheaper option is the Open Logic Sniffer which costs less than 50€ and has a the most important decoders like SPI and I2C. In theory, it has a trigger logic that could compete with the old HP standalones, but in reality, the GUI still doesn't support these complex triggers. Main drawbacks: no case, no input protection, noise on floating inputs, GUI is a bit lacking, not so many protocol decoders available, limited record length, pre-trigger setup doesn't really work with activated compression. Still, it's unbeatable for the price and as it's so small and doesn't need a big software/driver installation, I always have it in my bag and already used it dozens of times at work.
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