Hi. I can do most of my work OK with 2 channels. B/W display is OK, but color helps keep things straight, though. I've had a few moments where B/W traces overlapped and then went off in seperate directions, leaving me asking: which is which?
I have a 200MHz, four channel color LCD 'scope, a Tek TDS 2024B. No battery, though. I use it at work all the time. This allows me to track what's happening on the communications channels between two boards at the same time. Priceless.
I can track three digital signals and see what the rise//fall times of a glitch on a fouth trace look like, all at the same time, and see the timing between all these events. Even more priceless.
Then I dump the display to a USB thumb drive, save it to the design folder, write up a Word document with the displays in it, and pass it off to the engineer. No more scribbling my impression of the signals from a 2 channel scope, with crude measurements penciled in willy-nilly, for THIS boy! Priceless, indeed!
Still, at $2250, you have to sell the house to get one of these. Which I did.
For just under $400 you can get a 500 MHz, 32 channel, USB-driven logic analyzer.
https://www.pctestinstruments.com/
This covers those moments when even 4 channels won't cut it, which is where digital troubleshooting usually takes you. This allows you to set the triggering levels (-6 to +6 Volts); decode SPI and I2C traffic; and takes millions of samples in slow-changing circuits that make most analyzers unusable.
The moral: a 60MHz, two-channel B/W scope is a great starting point. But, no matter what you got, if you get serious about electronics, you'll always come to those moments where your equipment is inadequate for the job at hand. All you can do is try to figure what you'll need for equipment in the near future, then budget and buy something a little better than that. Grow into your projects, so to speak. Haunt Ebay for good, used items, hopefully with recent certification, from a technician who upgraded and is looking to sell off his earlier equipment. It happens!
Or, look to Ebay for new items from the Pacific Rim. Some are good, most are c*p. My rule(s) of thumb: if the manual reads well (no Chin-lish, thank you) and the specs are comparable to a name brand unit, then you're probably safe to buy it. Still, you'll want to go to the forums and ask around about other's experience with this stuff. A lot of this equipment is fine, and the prices are drop dead good.
And have fun doing it!
kenjj