NEW: HP 15C Collectors Edition

[Valentin Albillo]

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Hi, all,

Having posted my first impressions immediately upon getting my HP-15C CE delivered to my door just 21 hours after it reached Spain, there's a few additional comments once I've had the time to use it more extensively,

1. After 24 hours of heavy use, I've experienced no problems a all. The display is truly excellent, clear and contrasty, extremely readable, and the keyboard works perfectly: no missing keystrokes, no duplication, no undue bouncing; at least that's the case for my unit (#00236, which I ordered from The Calculator Store) and presumably might also be the case for its whole batch.
         
2. I say heavy because I've straightforwardly keyed in several highly non-trivial programs, using many advanced functions throughout, which ran perfectly, no problems whatsoever. I've also entered and verified hundreds of numeric values quickly and comfortably thanks to the awesome User STO/RCL instructions, which make the whole process as painless as can be. Mind you, I experienced not even a single error, every value entered was correct upon recall.
               
3. This CE calculator is a true speed demon: once I entered the required data, I was able to accurately compute the determinant of a 9x9 matrix almost instantaneously (a few tenths of a second, at most), which is quite remarkable for a handheld calculator of its size and concept, i.e. a portable emulation of a vintage ~40-yo original.
   

Tomorrow or early next week I'll post to this MoHPC forum the two programs I wrote specifically to test my CE, plus comments and sample runs. They'll work unchanged on any HP-15C clone (original HP-15C, 15C LE, 15C CE, DM15 64/128/229 regs, as well as assorted emulators running the original ROM as-is or patched for additional memory,) whatever the amount of RAM available in the particular device, physical or virtual.

In short, I'm extremely pleased, even more so than I was a couple' days ago. After using it I can't imagine using any other HP-15C flavour, this one is so good. And if you'd consider my heartfelt advice,

     Get yours while they last, lest you'd regret it very deeply if you don't. It's simply that much better than you'd think.

At least mine is. And why spend a fortune on eBay within a few years when you can get a NIB one for less than €130 right now ?

Best regards and have a nice weekend. I certainly will !
V.
Edit: typo