Review: Swiss Micros DM41X

[bkg2018]

(12-24-2020 07:30 PM)Hlib Wrote:  ... For this price, you can buy a couple of good cellphoness with half a dozen emulators, or 8 pieces of hp-39gii trash toys (80 MB flash, as hp said), or 4 pieces of ti-85 in perfect condition (real calcs with a lot of math and programming). Or, a single DM-41X with questionable hardware and design quality. A plastic sticker on the display is somehow not too modern. And the design and technology of the inscriptions on the front panel, it seems, was handled by the sales manager`s secretary. The chemical composition of the plastic housing is very similar to recycling.

I feel you're missing the point in DM41X. It's not about having a better calculator than the TI-85 - which I find difficult to think of as a dream machine anyway - it's about getting a perfect HP-41. The 41 has been and still is mythical, you cannot avoid the fact that the TI-85 never will.

I'm really happy I bought the DM41X. I find it's a remarkable mix of old tech and modern stuff, of course a few details could be tuned but this is a wonderful fan-service machine. The display is fantastic, although I'd like it backlit. The frank and clear click of each key is what I expected, although the two switches on the Enter key can be disturbing and I fear the relatively large opened space around keys will cause dust problems in the long term. I don't like the "Swiss Micros DM41X" font, it's certainly too big and less classy than the machine.

Maybe the price is a little too high compared to possibilities... A WP34C for example has a lot more functions. If you think of it, it matches what the 63-registers basic HP-41C was in 1979, that is: less power than competitors (even a TI-58C had more) with an incredibly higher price and an ugly display. That HP choose a 12 segs display for a high-end machine at the same time Sharp choose the beautiful dot-matrix display for its low-end PC-1211 is still unexplainable 40 years later. But it wouldn't be the 41 without it, and as unbelievable as it seems, I'm somehow happy to find these ugly characters on the DM41X display bottom lines.

The modules installed for free are a nice bonus - although I discovered them without knowing. The technical documentation is what it says, a technical doc. Too precise and not enough at the same time, you'll have to refer to the HP-41CX old manuals to use this machine.

A big plus in the DM41X is also the weight: you can feel the strong metal when the HP-41 really felt fragile plastic - and often, proved it was exactly that.

The blue for alpha letters labels is not blue enough to me, and a few keyboard overlays would have been nice. The delivery packaging was solid carboard but absolutely nothing else to protect the machine than plastic around it and a 'FRAGILE' label on package, which I think is a little optimistic. I would have expected an anti-moisture bag and some bubble or foam protection.

All in all I think the DM41 is very close to what a perfect HP-41 could have been, which certainly was what to achieve at Swiss Micros.