Quote:
Concerning the 35s I've found its display to be quite
uninspired, essentially being an inflexible character
cell configuration with the concession of fully RWM-mapped
pixels. The hp-42s did far better than that some 20 years
earlier.
The HP-35s is really disappointing, especially the display (beside the catastrophic software). First notably from the typographic point of view the digits / characters have ill-favored proportions, they are much too high and have the wrong spacing, and---besides the reflective screen---the resolution is to low for a good readability, in particular of greek characters. Squarish 'pixels' should solve the first problem---and they free up space for a third display line.
BTW there's a very nice technique for pure character-based displays, much better than 7x5 dot matrix elements (have a look at the brochure):
http://www.aegmis.de/PRODUKTE/GEAVISIONELEMENTS/SEGMENT/tabid/587/language/en-US/Default.aspx
In comparision to my every-day work-horse HP-15C from 1985---I give this masterpiece of 'engineering art' five stars in every category---the HP-35s gets four stars for the keyboard (five for the ENTER key!) and the color scheme [1], three stars for the general design of the casing (good: the rubber feets), at most two stars for its display and casing quality, and less than one for the (current) firmware and the processing speed (compared e.g. with the HP-15C LE).
Martin
[1] I give only three stars for the label font---the "Futura" is caused by HP's (IMHO) not very elegant corporate design. And it's very thoughtless or dilettantish for example to write the units "kg / lb" and "cm / in" correctly in lower-case letters but "KM / MILE" in capitals!
Edited: 19 Apr 2012, 5:55 a.m.