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Why did Tektronix stop making the great scopes?
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Wuerstchenhund:

--- Quote from: LabSpokane on December 24, 2014, 06:44:22 am ---Mmmm...ok...but we worked directly with every major printer company besides Canon and as far as as print quality and speed at that time, Tek ruled. Of course inkets were much higher volume and killed everyone on price with the advent of the sub-$100 printer.
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The thing is that it was Canon who actually was the technological leader in laser printing, not because of their own printers but because they developed very advanced printing engines and sold it to the majority of laser printer manufacturers (i.e. HP, QMS and many more).

Tek didn't even enter the printer business before (if I remember correctly) 1986 and came out with their original Phaser solid ink printer in 1989. At that time color laser printers didn't exist yet, and the inkjet printers of that time were pretty bad at image reproduction. Solid ink was quite good for reproducing images, and so lots of Phasers found their way into pre-press/proofing applications. However, solid ink just sucked at reproducing text, was very expensive (much more than laser printers and ink jets) and came with some other shortfalls (i.e. the requirement to keep ink temperatures high which meant high energy consumption), so Tek couldn't get into the much larger office printer market (and pre=press was too much of a niche to be sustainable as a sole business). To address this, Tek later added laser printers to their portfolio, but aside from one or two models which were good most of them couldn't really keep up with other printers using Canon engines.


--- Quote ---We worked direct with Tek and what I saw in development was printers printers printers. T&M felt like a sideshow in that era. Just my perspective from the cheap seats.
--- End quote ---

The printer division was separate from the T&M part, so it's not surprising that they felt they were the important part than the "other" BU. That's pretty common in most divisions of large companies. I also wouldn't expect the printer division to have much insight into what's going on in the T&M division.

However, the reality is that printers were more or less loss-leaders, and that Tek couldn't really compete with companies like HP who flooded the market with cheap and reliable laser printers and later also with more advanced ink jets. That's why Tek's printer business was sold off in 1999, only about 13 years after they started it, while the T&M part lives on for almost 70 years. This shows pretty clear which part of Tek was bringing in the bacon.
LabSpokane:

--- Quote from: Wuerstchenhund on December 24, 2014, 03:59:48 pm ---The printer division was separate from the T&M part, so it's not surprising that they felt they were the important part than the "other" BU. That's pretty common in most divisions of large companies. I also wouldn't expect the printer division to have much insight into what's going on in the T&M division.
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Since we were a former Tek shop, we actually worked with both T&M and the printer division.  I'm sure we didn't see everything going on.  But the noise certainly came from the printer side.

It was notable that in the "Silicon Forest" of Portland and Vancouver during that era, virtually every other tech company was growing while Tek continued to shrink. Before Tek, Portland was basically a big logging/timber town with surrounding agriculture in the Willamette Valley and Vancouver was a shipyard.  Tek changed everything there.  It's sad to see them essentially gone. 
zapta:

--- Quote from: Ecklar on December 24, 2014, 12:11:36 am ---... I'm hearing all over the place just how great the analog scopes are and that the digital can't replace the feel and response.   So if they are so great then why doesn't Tek or someone else use modern tech, and cheap Chinese labor and grind out these scopes at one quarter the price?


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What counts is not what people say but what people buy new. Is there would be a serious market for new  analog scopes somebody would fulfill it.
c4757p:

--- Quote from: Ecklar on December 24, 2014, 12:11:36 am ---I'm hearing all over the place just how great the analog scopes are and that the digital can't replace the feel and response.

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Digital can be as good as analog if you spend as much on a digital scope as the original buyer of your used analog scope spent on it. Sure, used analogs (which were originally sold at a cost of exp(holyshit)) can be better than cheapo digitals, but that's not of much concern to a company that only makes new equipment and doesn't generally cater to hobbyists... :P
Paul Moir:

--- Quote from: c4757p on December 24, 2014, 05:27:17 pm ---
Digital can be as good as analog if you spend as much on a digital scope as the original buyer of your used analog scope spent on it. ...

--- End quote ---

This is an extremely good point.  My 465 sold for $1825 when it was new.  Corrected for inflation that's about $8000 in today's money.  For that I could get a rather nice Agilent MSO which would be as nice to use, never mind that it is far more capable in every respect.
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