Spice series - differences in quality
Message #1 Posted by John Callahan on 9 Mar 2002, 10:40 p.m.
Hello all, this is my first post to this forum. I started collecting HP calcs about 6 or 8 months ago. One of the first I got, off of Ebay, was a 33C, one that was made in Singapore. I love this calculator and it is still one of my favorites. I decided to try to obtain 1 or 2 more of the 'Spice' series. I recently obtained a 32E from Ebay. I immediately noticed several 'quality' differences between the two calculators. The 33C has a very solid feel and a very crisp, responsive keyboard. It also has the slightly textured, very durable plastic keypad overlay similar to my 41C. The newly purchased 32E has a painted metal keyboard overlay, very susceptable to scratching. Also, the keypad on the 32E is very sloppy and requires very deliberate presses to function. When you shake the calculator you can even hear the keys rattle. I was quite surprised at these differences seeing that the better quality unit was a later model made in Singapore, and the poorer quality unit was made earlier in the United States. I also found that these differences are present with the same model numbers. A person I work with has two 31Es that have the same differences. Now that I've bored everyone to sleep, my actual question is is there any definite correlation between these differences and the country of manufacture / date of manufacture? Thanks all.
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