i,ve got a small-ish mitutoyo optical comparator on my workbench, I use it all the time. for the kind of work I do, it's indispensable - camera parts have all sorts of small features that are really hard to measure otherwise (eg. non standard screw pitches, small angles, slots...). so many of my projects have started with reverse engineering something on the shadowgraph. but yeah depending on what you do maybe it's not that useful...
yours looks pretty good, not all of them have the angle screen, and 3 lenses is pretty sweet (I wish I had the other lenses for mine !). mine has an X-Y table with a DRO - that's the other huge thing. for anything that fits in the 2" travel of the table it makes for a good 2-D pseudo CMM. having the DRO over analog mic heads is a pretty huge improvement too, for obvious reasons...
on the other hand, before I got the shadowgraph I bought a toolmakers microscope (crosshair and concentric ring reticle, X-Y table with micrometer heads) and I haven't used it in years...
ok so i did find a picture:
here's a case where without the shadowgraph I dunno what I'd do:
measuring the sprocket hole pitch of 16mm film... usually this is not something that important but I have a high-speed 16mm camera (wollensak fastax) that I intend to try out and on that camera it's super critical. (and this dummy roll of film was out of spec - either like that from new or it has shrunk over the years...)
