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The Best Graphing Calculator on the Market?
aaronbeekay asks: "I'm a sophomore in high school taking an honors chem course. I'm being forced to buy something handheld for a calculator (I've been using Qalculate! and GraphMonkey on my Thinkpad until now). I see people all around me with TIs and think 'there could be something so much better'. The low-res, monochrome display just isn't appealing to me for $100-150, and I'd like for it to last through college. Is there something I can use close to the same price range with better screen, more usable, and more powerful? Which high-tech calculators do you guys use?"
I use a TI89. It's about as good as you're going to get without it not being allowed on tests, etc.
HP is the only option. Sure, no one will no what you are doing (especially if you use RPN), but that means no one can borrow it, either. Oh, and if you use RPN you'll probably be a lot quicker than most of your classmates, too.
I have an HP-48GX and it served me well through high school and four years of engineering school.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
I just made it through single variable calculus and chemistry using an old TI-82 and a TI-86, which I had from high school ten years ago. Both were more then adequate for calc & chemistry, and you can get them for $10 / $30 respectively on ebay. They had most of the same functions as newer TI's, and served me well.
My only difficulty was an occasion scramble to find where some higher level functions were, as the rest of the class had newer calcs and they couldn't help me out.
Just do yourself a favor, get an older calc (with an instruction book), and spend the rest of the cash on ice cream.
No, it's not "high tech", by today's standards. Yes, it's low-res and monochrome. But you know what? It's the best damned calculator there is (well if you want to get a GX/GX+ or whatever for more memory that's fine too, though frankly not terribly necessary for most applications). It's got a steep learning curve (RPN and all that), but once you get over it you'll have the quickest and most useful device there is. It's built well (I've used mine for 12 years and it's doing just fine), feels good, and does the job right.
This is one realm where you want a tool, not a toy - if you want something flashy and shiny with a nice screen and pleasing UI, save your pennies for an iPhone or something. If you want something that does math, and does it damn well, buy an HP calculator.
PS - I guess this doesn't quite fit your answer as according to Wikipedia they stopped making them back in 2003, so it's not really "on the market" any more. They are currently selling HP-49 series, which is still better than TIs but just isn't built like the 48Gs (the tactile feel of the keys really does matter on a device where punching numbers is the main use). Still, I'm guessing that 30 seconds with eBay and you'll find 48G's...
Creative Creek seems to have a nice set for various PDAs.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The TI-89 is *mediocre* with drawing graphs, as you indicated. However, if you are going to study more science, it can do symbolic manipulation that you might only expect in a program like Maple or mathematica. If you are feeling dimwitted and can't work out an integral or maybe if you can't figure out if a particular algebraic equation has a solution then you can ask this device. It has more advanced features that I haven't used but if you tinker with it you'll get alot of use out of it. Also, as far as the graph drawing goes, I think they have a TI-92 that does better with those.
Although, I'm a little partial being a developer for TI and working on the next generation of calculators, I would have to say the TI nspire is the next big thing. It should be out next quarter. More to come.... http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US/n onProductMulti/nspire_cas.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-Nspire_CAS
No.
Yes, I currently use Spacetime http://www.spacetimemobile.com/ and sometimes Pocket Excel.
Grab a Palm TX; they rock. built in WiFi. Literally thousands of free apps & games, great text readers, easy to print out your work to a network printer.
I gave away the first PDA I got because I could not figure out a way in which it would possibly assist me more than carrying around a pad & pen.
But the TX does everything. It's got a SD slot, so you can carry around full length movies, a million MP3's...
Excuse me, I have to go hug my palm.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
There's an excellent open-source MATLAB clone called Octave. I've used it for a lot of real-world physics work in my lab. Worth checking out before you shell out for MATLAB.
My bicyles
I love my HP48GX. and once you grok RPN, there truly is no going back. so much easier for huge long formula calculations
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
You obviously aren't familiar with the AP tests. No PDAs allowed, only graphing calculators.
.866, but the TI-89 can also give you rad(3)/2. It also has standard stuff like constants, unit conversions, and ability to write your own programs which may or may not be useful to you. On the whole it's very useful and I can't think of anything more that I would want from my graphing calculator. These days they have some silver/platinum crap which draws graphs faster and has more memory for programs; I'd go with that.
Personally, I think the TI-89 is the best graphing calculator you can get. It's got very helpful algebraic functions that solve equations, factor polynomials, etc. It even does indefinite integration and differentiation of functions (very useful for checking your work when you take calculus, the TI-83 does no such thing). Everything looks nice and shows up just like you would write the algebra, so data entry is much easier. Previous calculations are stored in memory and you can just scroll up and select an answer or the calculation, and it will show up in the entry line. Very useful for complex calculations. It has the capability to display exact values, ie for cos(30) most calculators will give you
To be honest, you only really need a calculator until you leave high school. Getting anything fancier than a TI-89 is a waste of money. In college, a simple scientific calculator will suffice for lower division classes. If you go into engineering you will be doing serious math by hand and serious calculations by computer (MATLAB or FORTRAN). No more "graphing" in the sense of the primitive capabilities of graphing calculators. Once you've learned about all the things they can do, you move onto more complex functions and calculations, more complex data sets, and you just don't need to use a calculator to figure out what y = x^2 looks like. I imagine science and mathematics is the same, except maybe with Maple or something.
I would second a TI-89, if your teacher allows you to use it on exams. I had one for calc in high school, used it on the AP test and all my calc exams, and it makes things much easier. It is almost cheating, though, since it does symbolic differetiation/integration. Now that I'm in college, the professors won't let us use an 89 on the tests, but it's still nice when you want to check your answers for homework.
For programs on the HP calcs, look no further than www.hpcalc.org.
--- Pork is not a verb.
I'm a mechanical engineering major at Carnegie Mellon. In high school, I went through the same thing as you, your gadget urges telling you to buy something nicer than the TI-83 (now 84). Resist these urges. On tests, including the SATs and APs, fancy laptops and super-calculators are not allowed, and proctors will confiscate what they aren't sure about. All of your high school classes will be geared toward the 83/84, when teachers explain how to use a new function, they will explain it with 83/84 button presses, and you will be left frantically flipping through your 200 page manual to find the equivalent. Plus, all your friends are going to have 83/84s, so if you want to make/play games, these are the best calculators to do it on. I can confirm for you that right now, you are clear all the way through high school with an 83/84. Even as a mechanical engineer, lots of people still use 83s. I traded my 83 for an 89 Titanium in freshman year of college. The 89s are very powerful, but also a LOT harder to use than the 83s. Everything takes at least twice the button presses of the 83, and there are far fewer add-on applications. I know there are other brands, such as HP and Casio, but ignore these. These calculators are either crappy cheap ripoffs (Casio, even the color ones), or incredibly complicated unreliable overspeced computers (HP).
Ahh, so we're from the same vintage.
I bought my TI-85 shortly after they came out in '92, and I still use it (in my Ph.D. work, nonetheless). It's kind of a tank, and has held up well over the years (all 14 of them - crap I'm old).
I was going to suggest a TI-86, as it's the memory-upgraded 85. The TI-86 is also lacking symbolic math, so it is generally more allowed on tests and in classes than the TI-89, but it does have a lot of tools that the 83 & 86 don't (like simultaneous equations solving and polynomial root finding) that make it very useful.
I never had a TI-89, but I had its bulkier cousin, the TI-92, and from the times I've played around with the TI-89, the symbolic manipulation capabilities seemed pretty similar.
Sure, Mathematica or Maple will run circles around the TI-92/89, but I recall that the TI-92 could actually do some pretty impressive things. I certainly found that it would symbolically integrate some things that I otherwise would have used an integral table for. It could also do some very hairy algebraic manipulation (and often reducing the result down to something nice). BTW, I don't recall just what basic functions it can integrate, but it certainly can do Gaussians -- I used my TI-92 extensively for prob/stat stuff where I was calculating Gaussian integrals quite frequently. I believe the TI-89 will do the same stuff (someone please correct me if I am mistaken), and it won't be so ridiculously bulky.
I finished my Ph.D. a couple of years ago so it's been quite a while since I've been in any situations where I've been constrained by test taking considerations. =) I use a computer for all that stuff these days. (Which certainly makes sense, since I'm a computational scientist by profession.) But from what I recall of the days when I was frequently using calculators, I don't think you can go wrong with the TI-89, especially since its use is explicitly allowed on a bunch of standardized tests in the US.
BTW, I also used an HP48G extensively in college. I've still got it and use it occasionally, and it has some nice features. And, yes, once you get used to it, RPN is pretty clever. I see a lot of people championing it in favor of the TI calculators on here, but I mostly think that's because of the geek style points it confers. The HP48G series is way better than the TI calculators that came before the TI-89/92, but compared to the TI-89/92 I think the HP48G series really show their age. My 48G is *way* slower to do complicated calculations, much slower in drawing and manipulating graphs, and its symbolic manipulation capabilities are a joke.
... and of course, I'm a dumbass and forgot the link :(
http://www.mobilevoodoo.com/power48.htm
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Actually, back when I was in school, I had Octave + Gnuplot running on my Sharp Zaurus.
Yes, you really can run it on a $150 handheld.
Also worth mentioning is that there are convenient packages for Windows which include Octave and Gnuplot.
Here are some links:
Life is too short to proofread.
They don't make the TI-92 anymore, but the new version of the 89 has all of the features and power of the 92, without the qwerty keypad.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
I absolutely agree. The HP48GX is an amazing calculator. Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) rocks...you don't need to enter in brackets with complex expressions which probably makes it 20-30% faster than other methods. The calculator uses a stack system for its calculations. To add 2 and 3, type 2 and hit enter to put it into the stack. Then press 3 and hit enter...3 also appears on the stack. Then press +. This adds the bottom two entries in the stack. With complex expressions, you start on the innermost brackets and work outwards. Because your answers are always visible in the stack, it is remarkably easy to evaluate expressions without ever rounding more than the calculator's precision.
The stack doesn't just work for numbers. It is possible to enter in many types of objects. Enter two matrices or vectors into the stack, then press +, -, x, or / and the calculator will add, subtract, multiply, or divide the two matrices, just as if they were two numbers. To find the inverse matrix, enter it into the stack and press (1/x). Complex numbers are easily handled by entering them as vectors.
The main weakness of my version is that it is a bit slow when doing things like graphing. The origin of this problem lies in HP's neglect of this product. HP used to be a highly innovative and inventive technology company. They made products that no one else imagined making, things that were designed to meet the requirements of technical professionals like engineers. Then the bean counters/MBA's took over. They sold off most of HP's innovative divisions (Agilent Technologies for example) and became primarily a maker of bog standard PC's. They stopped making the 48GX for a while, but brought it back after a loud outcry. The new version was however not quite the same as the old version. It feels cheaper than the older calculators...it doesn't quite have the same solid feel. Bloody corporate bean counters! HP has been losing money for much of the time since they took over.
It is a shame that HP hasn't updated this calculator. With a newer processor, and a few interface updates, this could truly be the ultimate calculation tool. It is still great, but if it were a bit faster with a more polished interface, then it would be perfect.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
I must disagree with the parent on using the TI-89 in college. I am a junior in electrical engineering, and I use it all the time. While it is true that we use MATLAB for several classes, when it comes to test time, we aren't allowed to use computers. The TI-89 has definately helped me a lot in these classes, and on long 13+ hour assignments, it is extreemly helpful to simply let the calculator do the basic integrations and differentiations. That said, my personal advice would be to go with the TI-89. It is robust, very common, and with features like symbolic integration, amazingly useful.