I'm not that familiar with GW Instek scopes, though I did consider them when I made my recent purchase of a new scope. The GDS-3000 series is now over 10 years old, based on searching in this forum. 10 years is a long time for a scope, given all the innovations that have happened in the past several years. The one thing I quickly realized when searching for a scope that suits me is that the older model scopes simply aren't worth it, with regard to my main digital scope that I'll use everyday. I never realized how useful a lot of the new features are until I used them. The old saying, "time is money" definitely applies to me. Even outside of my job, I often do stuff which I sell or get paid to do. It's easy to forget, but unless you're a true hobbyist and time doesn't matter to you, you should calculate what your time is worth and figure that into your equipment purchase decisions. It's very easy in that case, as far as I'm concerned, to justify spending an extra $1000 to get the scope that'll really allow you to do your job efficiently, and over the life of the scope that additional investment can easily end up saving you a lot of money.
How this correlates to the new GDS-3654A/3354A, well, I assume this is an upgrade to the GDS-3000 series, and will be replacing it, or at least they'll be dropping some from that series. After all, at 10 years old, it's bound to become less and less economical to continue to produce, and it becomes harder to find components that are already EOL, etc. So it's definitely needed. I already made my decision last month on my scope, so it's too late to consider these new GW scopes now. I will though say that I'm in agreement that 800x480 resolution is just silly for a newly introduced scope. That alone would likely make me not consider it, though if I could find a dealer where I could see it in action, or watch a YouTube video of it, I'd be open to reconsider. I went with the Siglent SDS2014X+ and will do the upgrades, but the one thing I wished I had on my scope was separate controls for the 4 channels, which I see this one has. I'm sure the list price on this one will be a lot more than the Siglent, but then it's in a higher class, and may very well be worth it. Had I not just bought my scope, and if this one had a higher resolution, I definitely would had held up in making my decision to seriously consider this scope.
As for the comments about older people needing to see the screen, actually I fall into that category. Being able to see the screen well is extremely important to me. I remember I was visiting a different company some time ago, and they had a new middle range scope from either Tektronix or Agilent, I don't remember which, and the time base had the ms/us/ns stacked vertically and in such a small font that even with the scope right in front of me I couldn't easily make it out. I made me shake my head how someone just spent a good chunk of change on that scope, and to me the screen was unreadable, making the scope almost worthless to me. Sure, I could squint enough and make it out, or use a magnifying glass, but then my efficiency would go way down. So seeing the screen, and seeing it easily with just a glance is definitely a top priority for me. And to be honest, the most important thing in that regard is the GUI design and making the fonts the proper size so they can be EASILY read. Now a higher resolution can allow a good GUI designer to make the fonts even more readable, and the overall look much more pleasing. But no matter how high the resolution is, if you have an amateur GUI designer on the project, the high resolution is worthless, at least to me. Of course a higher resolution also helps a lot for making the waveform look more accurate.
Regardless that I'm not in the market for a scope like this, nice to see progress marching on.
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