With all the hoopla about the HP 15c LE commanding premium prices on the secondary market, it seems like there's another now discontinued HP calculator that is also selling at a premium. When I bought my HP 33s 3 years ago for under $40, which is $20 less than the 35s retail price, I never dreamed that I'd see it now selling at such lofty prices now that HP has seen fit to discontinue them. New units in their unopened blister packs are selling for 400% over list price and even clean used units are selling for well over $100. Meanwhile, the 35s is being heavily discounted.
Personally, I think that the 33s was a great calculator that in many ways was better than the 35s, and HP was foolish to have discontinued it. Early production had a display problem with a nearly invisible decimal point, but this was fixed in later production. It basically was a rational upgrade to the very good 32SII with much more memory, faster processor and a two-line display, while retaining all the nice features of the 32SII such as direct rectangular-polar coordinate conversion and separate primary keys for store and recall. It also was tapered at the bottom with soft side grips for comfortable handheld use. Finally, it had decent battery life, and the batteries are still good in mine nearly 3 years later. All these good features and more were lost with the 35s, and I've stopped using mine after going through three sets of batteries. Meanwhile, I use my 33s a lot to do simple calculations and run simple programs, and am very happy to have gotten one when they were still available at a normal price.