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Color Blindness and HP Prime keys color choice
02-20-2014, 11:39 AM (This post was last modified: 02-20-2014 11:51 AM by jebem.)
Post: #61
RE: Color Blindness and HP Prime keys color choice
I got my HP-PRIME just one week ago, and it is really a stylish machine that is a pleasure to look at (from a distance, that is!).
For sure Marketing people knows his business.

That said, and despite I having no trouble at all to distinguish colors, even when out of focus (I am 57 yo, using glasses for myopia and astigmatism), I confess that I have some trouble to distinguish one or another orange and blue symbol over those white keys of this new HP calculator.

Why on earth they did that? To annoy as many as possible seniors HP fans from the gold HP calculators era?
I believe that most teenagers (primary marketing target...?) have no trouble to read this keyboard schema, at least I read no complaints anywhere in the forums.

When we look to a recent (2007) calculator like the HP-35S, also full of style, showing keys in dark background and light color symbols, easy to read, I wonder what have happened since then, to choose this poor color scheme for this otherwise excellent HP-PRIME product.

I believe it wasn't a direct HP fault here (but, in the end, it is HP responsibility), as HP, like any other major brand these days, subcontract large oriental manufacturers to run the batch production.
Surely something went wrong with the keys pressing/molding technique, as it was pointed out before in this thread, the symbols looks a little bit out of focus/smeared.

HP, this issue must be fixed, and new proper keys set made available for free to anyone with skills to open the machine and replace them (I know, this is not happening, ever, but it was a nice move from HP).

Have a look to my HP-25 side by side with my HP-35S in the attachment (picture taken on a Samsung ST60, natural sunlight from Lisbon, a little out of focus due to poor lightning at the time and I took the picture handling the photo machine in my hands, no image manipulation except to resize the image to fit under the 200KB file limit of this portal).
More than 30 years between then, however they show the same family look, with great keyboard readability.
Is that hard to get a new calculator right since the beginning these days?

Jose Mesquita
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Messages In This Thread
RE: Color Blindness and HP Prime keys color choice - donald Williams - 02-11-2014, 10:01 PM
RE: Color Blindness and HP Prime keys color choice - jebem - 02-20-2014 11:39 AM



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