Strange Calculator: Triumph LS826

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

I recently got this calculator as part of a lot. Normally I don't care much about LCD calculators (including most of those from HP) so I probably would not have bought it on it's own.

It has some peculiarities however worth mentioning. First it has a yellow LCD which means it probably is from the late 1970ies.
Next it has a "DIG" key which I have not seen on other calculators in that particular way. It stands for "digits" and sets the number of decimal places similar to "DSP" on HP calculators. Only that the decimal point counts as well, so for "3.14" you need to press "DIG 3" (on HP it would be DSP 2). It also switches to exponential notation with one fixed single mantissa digit. "INV DIG" turns it back to normal mode.
Then there is the green box that comes with it and smartly doubles as calculator stand (see the little imprinted illustration). I wonder why no other comany had that idea.

But the strangest thing is that Triumph Adler (or rather the company that made the calculator for them in Japan) forgot, or deliberately omitted, to print most of the shifted functions onto the keyboard including the summation and statistics.
It is not that they didn't print anything at all on it - some labels are there - but the majority is missing. To compensate, a little piece of paper is glued into the box which shows the shifted keys. It looks as if it based on a hand drawn sketch using ink and stencils. It could also have been made using a plotter. Does anybody have the slightest idea why anything like that could happen to a mass-market product?

I found a french website dealing with the calculator (finally my weekly french lesson pays off :-) https://le-rayon-des-calculatrices.fr/Wo...s3/?p=1040) but little else on the web.

Regards
Max