HP-35s photo gallery Message #1 Posted by Mike Mander on 23 Aug 2007, 2:51 a.m.
Hi all,
Just received my 35s here in Vancouver, Canada. Before getting the new machine all grungy (it is destined to be my day-to-day work calc), I thought I should take a few photos of it. Unfortunately I don't have my SLR (sold it in anticipation of a new Canon model coming in early September) but I managed some halfway decent shots with my point & shoot Canon Pro1.
New HP-35s Gallery
I will say that the 35s looks far more handsome in person that it did to me on the photos I had seen previously. I very much like the styling and am not too bothered by the cursor keys. I won't bother adding too much since this calculator has been reviewed "to death" already, however there are a couple of things I would like to mention...
1) No comma separators when keying in a number! Argh... one of the best features of the older "pure" RPN calculators and something I have always missed on my 49g+ and 50g. Now that's also missing from the 35s. Too bad...
2) No question, a vastly superior LCD when compared to my first-generation 33s. Better contrast and much more visible off-axis, as well as having comma separators that are clearly distinct from the decimal point. Compressed font is not as esthetically pleasing as the almost square-pixel one on the 33s, but it is readable so I can't/shouldn't really complain!
3) Excellent keyboard but I had an off-kilter 5 key. I grabbed and twisted it a little and now it is almost flat and level with the others. Love the big ENTER key of course!
4) Surprised to see that R/S doesn't interrupt a loop as reliably as older machines. Sometimes you can press it over and over before it responds. Not a hardware contact problem though. Pressing the ON/C key will interrupt and halt a program instantly though.
5) LCD is perfectly straight AFAICT and an almost straight s/n label is also nice to see.
Probably won't do too much programming on it since my 50g fulfills that need nicely. Don't think I can get used to a 4 level stack, no local vars, no non-GOTO based looping constructs, no proper I/O, no non-trivial labels or many of the other things I had been taking for granted on the RPL machines.
Still, I very much like the 35s and it will be a challenge to port over some of my astronomy programs and such - it does have some very interesting features to mess around with. It is also certainly far more svelte than my bulky 50g and thus easier to carry around.
Regards,
Mike Mander
P.S. Now, bring on the 43s!!!
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