I received my second-hand HP-50G Blue today. This is an ordinary HP-50G but in an unusual blue livery. It seems that it appeared first in Spain and Latin-American, but few claims being able to source it in Germany or the US. Nevertheless, it is quite unique. More importantly, though, a calculator color scheme is known to impact the readability of the keys’ markings. For example, although HP darkened the blue and orange markings of its third revision of the HP Prime, it is still quite hard to read in dim environments. So, a fully blue HP with white keys could be a fail as well. It turns out that the blue version reads very well and feels even easier to use than the black one. Last but not least, I read several times that owners of the blue HP-50G could not capture its true color, the pictures not looking as the real thing. This doesn’t seem to be related to the camera as they reported, but to the quality of the lights, they used. I took most of the pictures of this post in direct sunlight, which turned out to be a perfect match to what I see. When I used fluorescent to LED light, the result is indeed disappointing. Nothing beats the sun! Last nugget of information: when you use the HP in full sunlight, you can see the LCD’s refresh rate.
