[ QUOTE ]
CatShooter, I have agreed with many of your post's disagreed with many as well but this one leaves me bewildered. You sold your 35P for a CED (the best chrono ever made for a so-so chrono at best). I will be scratching my head wondering what-up until you fill us in on the details of this move. UB
[/ QUOTE ]
OK... I'll fill you in. My first non-laboratory chrono goes back some 35 years - it used 35mm film with silver paint on it, and a R/C circuit. You shot the two films, read the time constant, and looked it up on a conversion chart... it was crude, but I was way ahead of my time - no one else had one!
I bought one of the first #33 Oehlers and loved it. It was a monster in a steel case - I had it for over 20 years, and it died cuz the batteries leaked and ate up the circuit board (Evereadys /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif ).
I sent it back and told them I would pay for the repairs, and a week later, I got a new #33... (I still have it!) It was, and is, a friggin brick!
I bought the 35-P when it came out. I liked the printer feature, but because I do a lot of shooting over screens, I quickly found that the printer ate up batteries F-A-S-T.
I would go through 2 or 3 batteries in a day of shooting over screens... and when the batteries died, they just died... and all the data went with them /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif
I had many talks with Ken about the 35-P, and Ken said that there were mistakes made in it, that would be corrected in the next model.
The case was an OEM case that came from a desktop calculator and it was a poor choice, because getting the paper to feed from the little wire thing was a PITA, and he recommended to just let the paper roll lay on the 3 screen plugs so it would feed right.
Ken also said that the light sensitivity was less than the #33 so it was not usable in lower light situations... which I also found.
There is no room in the case for larger batteries, and no plug for an outside battery pack was fit.
Also... the margin for the "error screen" was so sensitive, that if you were shooting fast loads (22-250) and switched to slow loads (.22 Hornet) you had to reset the center screen, or you would get ALL ERRORS.
If you wanted to look at a figure in the middle of a string, you had to cycle through the entire set of numbers (printing them out at the same time) in order to review a single shot.
The 35-P was a transitional model that was going to be replaced by a better one... which will never come.
The two things that hit Oehler hard were the low cost chrono's ($100 and under) that were becoming available, and the mid price chrono's that were computer compatable.
In order to be competitive, they would have to come out with a unit that would be computer compatible, with a better case, and some other things... which would undercut or kill sales of their own model 43, which is their bread and butter model of the company.
So they had no choice but to leave the "hobby" market.
I still have the Oehler #33, and it is a great unit. I have the CED, and love it... you can review any of the numbers by just hitting that button. You can use an after market printer (HP) that runs on it's own batteries. It's error system is not overly sensitive. It's in a case that was designed for it. The numbers are LARGE... it can be read at 200 yds with a decent spotting scope.
It will feed the shots directly into a laptop running ballistic software.
That's my reasons.
.
