Published on 05/02/2023 10:57 PM by JGD
The HP15c Collector's Edition
You may already know the news: there is a new reissue of the HP15c: the Collector's Edition. Today the HP licensee Moravia has announced this new product, of which only 10.000 units will be produced. The calculator will be sold in a package that can also be used for display - same as the HP15c Limited Edition of 2011, or the HP12c 30th Anniversary.
The units are expected to arrive to Europe early July, with a part being flown in and the rest shipped in a container with the rest of the production of new HP calculators.
What are the differences between this unit and the previous two versions?
- 100x faster than the original model - similar speed as the limited Edition.
- More memory: 98 registers instead of 65 - 672 programming steps instead of 442. There could have been more registers, but the team chose a safer memory configuration instead of more memory but that can give problems on display and in extreme situations (more than 1000 programming steps, big matrices, etc.)
- All known LE bugs have been fixed.
- Far longer battery life than the Limited Edition: aside from the original model (whose batteries lasted many years ), the Limited Edition was not known for long battery life: typically two months of normal use. In addition, the low battery indicator would not lit, not giving the user the chance to change batteries in time to avoid memory loss. This new version has longer life: my prototype has been running with the same charge since August 2022. Apart from having a lower consumption processor, there have been some strategies to reduce consumption: not all keys run at the same speed. Those that run programs, matrix calculations, solve or integrate run at 4x the speed of the rest of the keys.