Advice needed for cheap and good equipment for lab!

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When buying equipment for teaching, also keep in mind that you might want to teach about selecting the right equipment for the job. Buying the cheapest junk multimeter is likely to give the students the feeling that relying on junk for safety and reliability is ok.

not necessarily. You could always buy used fluke meters. Besides i dont think a kid would know that a particular brand is junk or good. Just dont introduce them to cheap chinese stuff especially if you want to show a bit of patriotism

Its more to do with the use such as can they learn by using this equipment? And also the feel of the equipment that it does what they want to easily and does it well. Its one of the reason analog scopes are a vintage item.

[vk6zgo]

I'm just learning about DSOs and I'm not finding the transition to be difficult.  I still only twiddle 3 things:  Volts/div, Time/div and trigger polarity/level.  That's all I need from a scope.  All the other stuff is interesting to look at but not terribly useful - to me.  As a guy who plays with FPGAs, uCs and robotics.  Sure, I like the 4 channels but I got along for a long time with just 2.  I bought the 1054Z specifically for 4 channels and the idea that I ought to expand my horizons.

But on the bench, I twiddle the same limited set of knobs that I used on the analog scope.  In some ways, the menu system is slower.  I actually have a 'switch' on my analog scope to change trigger polarity.  I don't need to fool around with a menu.  Trigger level is more intuitive on the DSO (it draws a little line) but both work the same.  There isn't any difference in Volts/div and Time/div - just twiddle the knobs.

I just don't see my having learned on an analog scope as a handicap.  Same knobs, different colors...  In the context of this lab, finding RMS, P-P, FFT and all that stuff is useless.  Now, the pulse width measurements will be handy but, really, that's why the graticule is there.   500 uS/div, 3 div wide pulse -> a 1.5 mS wide pulse which ought to center the servo nicely.  In such a system, measuring the width to 3 decimal places is useless.  "About" is close enough!

I know I'm swimming against the tide!  As I look at multi-thousand dollar analog scopes being sold for $200 or less I get the idea that the market is rather limited.  Everybody wants a DSO!

A downside of getting some analog 'scopes is that you would be unlikely to pick up four identical ones.
The other thing is that good brands are old,affecting reliability------you can still buy new analog Oscilloscopes,but they are fairly basic ones,& are very overpriced.

School lab 'scopes don't need to be spectacularly good------the Cossor things they had back in Tech School were very far from "state of the art",even in 1960,but we learnt the subject using them OK.

I think I would go with the Rigols---the OP may get a discount for buying four.