Casio FC-200 Financial Calculator: a Japanese classic from around 1988

[jebem]

I like these Casio 80's classic looking well built machines.
This one was for sell at one local shop in Porto city. Salesman assured me it was new.

Well, probably the calculator was never sold and being exposed out of the box for years to sun and dust in the shop shells didn't help.

Whatever it was happened, it looks like new old stock to me.
I would say the keys are yellowed by excessive sun exposure, but I do not see the typical finger marks on them, so probably the machine was never used.
Another typical indicator of usage in these Casio series are the back cover screws that usually shows signs of bad manipulation (using wrong tools) when opening it to replace the batteries. Not in this case, as the back cover is immaculate and the screws looks absolutely shiny.

Inside the original Japanese Hitachi CR2032 cells were both dead and fortunately without signs of leakage.
After installing a new set of batteries the calculator came to life nicely.
The fine contrast adjustment, like its scientific fx-5000F sister, is done by adjusting a rotating potentiometer on the right side.






Beltrão Coelho, Lda, was the official Casio distributor in Portugal at the time.
They used to include a locally translated quick start guide in Portuguese to complement the original Spanish/English manual.




Two sort of sister machines: The scientific formula fx-5000F and the Financial FC-200.
They share a common set of design concepts, despite having specific LCD display capabilities to support the different features. The fx-5000F sports two lines plus indicators, where the top row is dot matrix for alphanumeric display and the bottom row is 7-segment numeric. The FC-200 uses one dot matrix alphanumeric line plus indicators and dedicated three 7-segment exponent digits.