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Casio Unveils New Color Screen Graphing Calculator
An anonymous reader writes "As reported by hobbyist calculator programmers, Casio has recently unveiled new graphing calculator models, the Casio fx-CG10/20 series, less than a year after Texas Instruments released the TI-Nspire Touchpad. The calculators features a 65536 colors screen (16-bit) with a resolution of 384x216 pixels, 16 MB of Flash memory (10 available for the user) and 140 hours of battery life. The calculators will retail starting at $129.99. Although Casio's new calculator official page have limited information about the calculator programming capabilities and processor speed, could this eventually mark the end of TI's reign in North American schools?"
http://xkcd.com/768/
I don't understand the need for such fancy calculators for students. I'm sure there are some professionals that might like to have it, but I used a TI-83 through all high school and college and never found something you couldn't make it do that you needed.
What is the purpose of making these calculators with color screens rather than just making simpler but still advanced graphing calculators cheaper?
I'm not trying to be overly critical - maybe a tad skeptical.
This is definitely *cool*. What's the point in this, though? I'm a programmer/developer, but I've never been a hardcore "programmer" or user of calculators. As long as I can do some basic graphing and standard 4-function stuff, most calculators make me super happy.
The first immediate con I can see of this is...usability. If I'm colourblind - I'm not going to be very thrilled about this.
The first immediate pro I can see of this is.....help me out here.
Sure, this is cool, but why do I want to pay $130 for a color model when I can get a standard monochrome one for $50ish?
So how much DRM and anti-modification features did they manage to pack into this device for $129.99?
They've made a killing over the last 12 years selling hardware that is essentially minor improvements to their existing calculators. The differences between my TI-89 and the current TI-89s are minor, even with 12 years between them. Combine that with how TI-centric some math textbooks tend to be, and they've got the market locked down pretty tight.
Although, having colors would make it easier to differentiate plots when doing several at one time.
But it will probably result in a color-screen nSpire sooner than we might otherwise have seen one. Which is A Good Thing (tm) - some of the graphing uses of my nSpire would be much nicer with color to distinguish the plots.
Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
That and a device like an iPod Touch isn't recognized as a calculator, so like many laptops and the TI-92, it is barred in many tests were the standard calculator form factor is permitted.
That and a device like an iPod Touch isn't recognized as a calculator, so like many laptops and the TI-92, it is barred in many tests were the standard calculator form factor is permitted.
Oooh, somebody make an iPod case that looks like a cheap-plastic boxy graphing calculator case. Fake buttons FTW.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This story makes me miss my Hewlett Packard calculator, an HP-41cx (with accessories of a mag card reader and a printer). When I studied engineering, there were two broad groupings of calculator recommended, especially when you got to classes on circuit theory: Some Texas Instruments grouping I don't remember, and the HP-41 series. Literally the recommendation was use one or the other, or you will likely fail this class due to lack of computation speed on exams.
Hewlett Packard seems to have become irrelevant in the marketplace. Very sad, long live RPN!
That left just Texas Instruments for the serious calculators that aren't full-on computers.
Sure, Casio had "scientific calculators", but they just weren't quite up to the demands back in the eighties (yes, I'm old).
It's nice to see this market getting another player, although in my mind "color graphing" is a gimmick, not a real feature!
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
Can we just get a car analogy option for moderating?
No wireless. Less space than a TI. Lame.
Uh as someone who went through a hardcore engineering program, no. RPN was common for awhile because at some point in the dark ages of personal computing the amount of ram/rom that would be needed for a machine to convert infix to postfix was actually a sizable amount. The only arguable superiority of RPN is not needing parenthesis for order of operations, however since every child is raised from kindergarten on infix it's hardly an advantage. This isn't dumbing down of society anymore then making compilers instead of writing raw machine code by hand is dumbing down programming. There's no benefit to doing unnecessary work as an engineer just to make life easier on a computer.
Somehow I doubt that Casio officially unveiled it with a forum post.
And if we did have to link to a forum post (for some unknown reason) instead of something more official, this would have been better anyway...
Official website: http://www.casioeducation.com/prizm
edu.casio.com: http://edu.casio.com/products/cg_series/fxcg10_20
Manual download: http://edu.casio.com/products/cg_series/data/fxcg10_20_E.pdf
Models: fx-CG 10*/20
* North America only
Some of the new features:
- High-resolution color display (384*216 pixels with 2^16 colors)
- USB 2.0 support
- 16 MB flash memory
- Picture Plot functionality
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
While an app for a modern handheld device sounds like a great idea, it'll never fly because these have to be used during standardized testing. Text your friend (or an online service) for the solution.
Those of us fortunate to own one (as opposed to merely borrowing one from the school) often go our first introduction to programming through the TIs. I personally started a collection of digital art on mine which I then used a cable to offload to PC, where it wasn't as impressive, but that foreshadowed how I would spend the next few years in calc labs - making cool 3D objects instead of doing my homework. No, students don't *need* anything this fancy. But if it encourages kids to start coding on their own, what's the harm?
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
The fact that graphing calculators of quite modest specs and build still cost so much is a gooey blob of saliva in the face of idealist theories of competition.
However, the fact that graphing calculators are still of quite modest specs isn't.
The market for calculators is, basically, tests. They might also be used for homework and the occasional foray into programming; but they are basically purchased for tests. In a testing environment, wifi and 16GB of internal storage are not, shall we say, of much use in maintaining a fair testing environment.
Even if you make the "If the test is good, flashcards won't help you, and neither will notes stored on a calculator/iPod/whatever" argument(which is arguably a lot truer at higher levels), that still doesn't address the issue of network connected devices.
Imagine the following: iPod touch/iPhone with camera, internet connection, some sort of web conferencing software. Pay 29.95 at the paypal portal and, for the duration of the test if you get stuck on a problem, take a picture of it, and a suitably educated person in India solves it and sends back an image of the solution. Win/win(sort of). The cheater can get past even "mere facts won't save you" questions, and someone in a lower cost of living country makes comparatively good money solving easy problems in their area of expertise. The test, of course, becomes useless.
Intentionally limited devices for pedagogical purposes are eminently sensible. It's just that it should be pretty simple to stamp out a TI-83(or 89, the hardware doesn't exactly differ wildly) for absolute peanuts, not $100 a pop.
It isn't allowed because it has potential to do things other than being a calculator during a test. One could load an entire text book, take photos of tests and email questions, surf the web, and any other number of activities that would be construed as cheating. It's much easier to require a real calculator, no matter how overpriced or limited they are.
No... RPN has more advantages than you claim, and people who have become adept at it (not just learned it as a token thing, but really learned to think in that way) almost never want to go back.
(1) You can see intermediate results of your calculations as you go along.
(2) Fewer keystrokes are needed to perform computations, so there are fewer opportunities for mistakes.
(3) For highly proficient users, RPN allows for faster use of the calculator because of not having to enter and track lots of parens.
It's a similar situation to texting on a cell phone vs touch typing. If you are used to texting and never learned to touch type, you won't truly realize how much of a superior input system touch typing is.
But more and more our world is moving away from things that require any degree of learned skill, in favor of no or low-skill methods which yield inferior results.
You know what I would personally like to see? I would love to see some kind of touch screen tablet computing pad (something like the iPad, or Galaxy tablet, or whatever) that had a mathematics and scientific data centric focus. It would be sweet to see a product like that hit the market. I would want it to come preloaded with a good data and simulation language (something like Matlab/Simulink or Scilab/XCOS). I would want it to come preloaded with some handy mathematical functions typically found in TI calculators (matrix operations, statistics plotting, solving of symbolic integrals and derivatives). Hell, if it had WiFi access even better. For bonus points add on an uber unit conversion program with a very clean simple interface.
I don't know, maybe something like this already exists, but if it does I haven't heard about it. If any 'dotters know of one, I would love to see a link. I would happily fork over some cash for a small computing platform like this that I could carry around in my back pocket (I don't want to have to find a way to strap another satchel to my body when riding my motorcycle). Finally, making it truly rugged and badass and able to survive getting dropped in water and sand would be great. Why won't a company develop an engineer/scientist specific tablet that could be used in a multitude of environments. It would be the ultimate geek multi-tool!
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
I have an Algebra book but it irritates me because it's centered on the use of a graphing calculator. It teaches Algebra... but it IMMEDIATELY begins a discussion of graphic calculators, and not as an add-on device. I'm going to write an arithmetic book that teaches the use of a Soroban; but this will be teaching math, and then it will step out to "so here's how to do addition on a Japanese Abacus... and here's how it relates to pen-and-paper columnar addition... and think about this, it makes it simple in your head." I don't want to teach people that math == device; math is a method, device is a tool.
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The point of approved calculators for standardized testing to eliminate devices that can do things beyond the kind of assistance the test allows for, particularly things that might facilitate cheating, or which produce noise which might be distracting. See the SAT rules, for instance.
Well, except that nothing restricts (either in principle or practice) the approved calculators to "TI Calculators".
One answer that maybe nobody else will come up with: Easy UI.
I just find it a lot faster and easier to punch up some calculations on a device that has a whole mess of purpose-built buttons on the front of it, rather than trying to do the same with a standard keyboard that was never intended for scientific calculation. You can write up programs and key them to buttons, too.
Disclaimer: I use an HP 50g. Your experience with a TI or Casio calculator may vary. RPN, baby.
Breakfast served all day!
Handheld calculators have consistently disappointed me. Those that graph do so poorly. Those with complex functions make them all but impossible to use. Apart from statistics, there is not the slightest whiff of anything resembling a special function of any kind, and anything more advanced that acosh is basically nonexistant. Is it too much to ask for a bessel function to be built in somewhere?
Some machines have matrix support, but it's generally shockingly poor sometimes restricted to 3x3 matrices and generally lacking anything above an inversion operation--if that. A lot waste resources on pie chart/spreadsheet software which is wasted on business and accounting students who are just going to end up using excel anyway; The addition of image support on some recent models simply adds insult to injury on this front.
I could go on for hours, but I'll just add the one item that bothers me the most.
Complex Numbers.
It's 2010. People have mp3 players with more computing power that the Cray-1. Is it too much to ask that scientific calculators support complex numbers natively? There are still some models with over 500 functions and no complex number support! Even those models which do generally make i all but inaccessible; necessitating at best a second function shift and at worst a mode change to input or sometimes even view this most elementary of entities. Is it really so much to ask--in the 21st century--that when I input sqrt(-1) into my calculator that I get something other than MATH ERROR. There's no math error or even a maths error. There's a calculator error for having put in a square root function without considering complex numbers!!
Going back to the main story: Curved keyboard designs are appalling and Casio need to get with the program and make a better "=/ANS" button make their bracket buttons larger a la Sharp and TI. In conclusion I'd like to buy at least one calculator before I die that was a substantial improvement on the one I purchased in 1997.
May the Maths Be with you!
You are right about anecdotes. However, in the absence of real data, anecdotes are all we have.
Let me put it this way: the people who bash RPN are mostly people who have not really used it. If a person actually takes the time to learn RPN and become proficient with it, they never seem to want to go back. I would LOVE to hear from somebody who is good at RPN, but still prefers algebraic entry.
Yes, in some cases, it might be easier to just enter the equation as it is listed. With the HP 48 G series (the latest that I have used), you CAN enter equations that way if you want to.
Generally, I can bang out an equation on RPN much faster than I can using a standard algebraic calculator. Also, hitting "enter" to duplicate an entry on the stack only takes one keystroke, where storing a number to a named memory location typically takes at least three key presses. And, you never have to bother to hit a parenthesis key. Yes, your own brain has to do a little more work, but some of us enjoy that.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
No, it doesn't.
Take this example:
(5 + 3) * (3 + 2)
When we think and calculate it in our head, we take 5 and 3, add them to get 8. Then we take 3 and 2, add them, and get 5. Finally, we multiply 8 by 5 to get 40.
And guess what? That's exactly how RPN does it. Including giving you the intermediate results of 8 and 5.
Infix means you can't do the multiplication because you don't know what to multiply with at that point.
(If trying to force the multiplication earlier by expanding, you get "5 + 3 = 8, 8 * 3 = 24, 8 * 2 = 16, add 24 and 16 to get 40", but that still requires doing a calculation on the right hand side of the operation before jumping back to it.)
The fancy calculator I had when I was a kid (late 80's) was the size of a phone in 2010. Today's calculators have nothing like the processing power of a phone that costs roughly the same, yet they are now the size of ancient mobile phones. I don't get it.
An artificial market for underpowered devices has been created
Not really artificial. Worried about cheating, I'd guess. It wouldn't be too difficult with a laptop to hook up through a cell phone modem in your final and simply transmit the problems to a grad student friend.
You *want* an underpowered device. It guarantees that it's the student coming up with the answers. And for my two cents, even this Casio is overpowered for the task. First thing I thought when I saw those graphic overlay graphs is that it would be trivial to make crib sheets and scan them into the thing. Plus it probably has an ARM processor in it, which means eventually Linux will be running on it. Once you manage that, all bets are off. Some whacko will port Maxima to it and that'll be that.
Maybe I'm getting to that "get off my lawn" age, but if you study and have a 2 dollar calculator that can do trig...you really shouldn't need much of anything else.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
A lot of people who love editing with VI would disagree with you. Yes, it is a lot more trouble to learn this than to just use Notepad, but those who have learned it love it and would never go back.
Also, by your definition, the automatic transmission should easily beat a stick-shift. Guess what race cars use?
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
I think we benefit as a society when we have some common sense of history
Then why don't U.S. schools teach the history of neighboring countries? A Michigan resident is more likely to learn about Texas than Ontario, even though Ontario is much closer.
literature
Who decides what literature gets onto the required reading list? For example, a lot of people appear to consider The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald to be overrated, yet it gets on the required reading list and not Gadsby: Champion of Youth by Ernest Vincent Wright. Six tragedies by William Shakespeare get on, along with none of his comedies and none of his contemporaries' plays.
Intentionally limited devices for pedagogical purposes are eminently sensible. It's just that it should be pretty simple to stamp out a TI-83(or 89, the hardware doesn't exactly differ wildly) for absolute peanuts, not $100 a pop.
So where are the cheap chinese clones?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That's not the way I think.
I think: 5*3 + 5*2 + 3*3 + 3*2 = 15 + 10 + 9 + 6 = 40.
I think I just foiled your argument.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.