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.

[jebem]

(07-20-2015 04:56 PM)jebem Wrote:  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.

(continued)

[jebem]

Dismantling for internal inspection.

Well, I have to see my ophthalmologist. When I replaced the old batteries for new ones, I didn't notice a small amount of battery leakage in one of them.
Nothing serious, as the main board has got a plastic protection under the battery compartment for such eventualities.





Integrated Circuits:
HD61747B55 Processor.
HD61914 1KByte static RAM.




Time for reassembling.
Working with these Casio machines is as easy as it gets on small pocket machines.
A few screws to be set and that's about it.
If done carefully, there will be are no traces left that the machine was opened.



(continued)

[jebem]

And it came back to life once again.

Maximum contrast set, to show the LCD elements.



Default settings after installing new batteries. No Reset was needed to restore the operation after power on.
Nice thousands and decimal separator.



Dot matrix LCD allowing for alphanumeric capability.

[Sukiari]

Casio and TI overall have had much better build quality than HP. If a person could get HP (of old that is) quality guts in a case with a TI or Casio level of durability we'd have a real winner.

[nomWannie]

Hi, my dad has an old FC-200 and I'm looking to get it working again but when I try to google the correct batteries to use for it I only find results for the new version of the FC-200, was hoping you'd be able to tell me what batteries you use

[Dave Britten]

(03-16-2023 03:03 AM)nomWannie Wrote:  Hi, my dad has an old FC-200 and I'm looking to get it working again but when I try to google the correct batteries to use for it I only find results for the new version of the FC-200, was hoping you'd be able to tell me what batteries you use

CR2032, two of them. I just had to replace the batteries in one of my fc-200s a few days ago. Incidentally, this is probably my favorite financial calculator.

[nomWannie]

(03-16-2023 12:14 PM)Dave Britten Wrote:  

(03-16-2023 03:03 AM)nomWannie Wrote:  Hi, my dad has an old FC-200 and I'm looking to get it working again but when I try to google the correct batteries to use for it I only find results for the new version of the FC-200, was hoping you'd be able to tell me what batteries you use

CR2032, two of them. I just had to replace the batteries in one of my fc-200s a few days ago. Incidentally, this is probably my favorite financial calculator.

Perfect, thanks for the help!