Exactra 22 & 23 display - The dos and donts of buying a vintage calculator

Anytime you are dealing with vintage calculators you have to remember that the tech in these things was developing and changing by the week... This was the start of the personal computer age, and these thing were hotcakes of that industry... Every company making these things was looking for a way to undercut the competition and if that meant making a revision to the products guts (with literally that weeks newest development) they jumped on it so they could leverage the price... No need to waste money on a new model number, new packaging or even tell the consumer the insides were different since it functioned the same...

Collecting calculators and their unknown internal revisions can be a tangled mess...

^ Very insightful, thank you! It is an interesting business. Prop making aside, it's cool to have one of these

Do people know...are most LED bubble strips the same size?

And the big pitfall of course, that with all of us trying to get original screen acurate parts is that a lot of the calculators out there, while being the correct model, have either had the strip removed (a fact not always disclosed) by the buyer, then seller, attempting to recoup some costs - you know, buy it for $100, get an original strip and resell for $80 to $100 - free parts! or someone has replaced the real strip with a cheaper copy strip. There are a lot of unscrupulous sellers out there. one i looked at on a certain auction site looked like it wasn't right so I asked if it was complete and intact with the bubble strip, the seller dodged the question, had claimed it was working but told me they didn't have any batteries to check if the bubble strip was there, a bit of a copout really. Still went for big money, someone would have been disappointed and asking for a refund.