When I was a kid in the late 70s I was very much into electronics as a hobby and was quite focused on science in school, especially physics. Anyway back then the first electronic calculators were coming out, stuff you could see in high street stores and advertised in electronics magazines, this is when the term "electronic slide rule" began to appear.
As a result I spent a huge amount of time using calculators for electronics when I later went to college and was impressed by what was around back then.
My dream machine was a TI-59 but it was simply unaffordable as was the almost as good TI-58.
Anyway back to the present as I'm refreshing my knowledge of electronics and LC circuits and basic differential equations and complex numbers, I wanted a calculator that I could use, much as I would as a teen, sitting with pen n paper and working through examples or questions. I know we have computers now and they blow calculators away functionally, but it is so much more focused to work with a dedicated calculator, or stand at my white board calculator in hand working through some calculation.
Now I did get a pretty good HP 35s calculator about a year ago, didn't use it much until recently and it is very well built, the colored keys and key quality is as good as it gets with a calculator, but the display is not lit and is rather basic LCD screen, and often a result that has lots of digits must be "scrolled" to see the full value or to see the exponent and this started to annoy me.
So I now found - and got from ebay - a very good and newer HP, the HP Prime G2 calculator, which has recently been discontinued (rumors are that HP are getting out of the calculator business).
This is after a lot of investigation, it is rated better than the top range TI graphing calculator too.
Now I can do calculations and not have to scroll the result and the display is far better than the HP 35s.
So if you're in the market for a decent real calculator I'd definitely recommended the HP Prime G2.
(I didn't buy a new one from Amazon because some of the feedback comments indicate they are not really brand new, that's pretty bad so I went to ebay and got used but in as-new condition, my unit is fine and was 30 bucks less than Amazon).
As a result I spent a huge amount of time using calculators for electronics when I later went to college and was impressed by what was around back then.
My dream machine was a TI-59 but it was simply unaffordable as was the almost as good TI-58.
Anyway back to the present as I'm refreshing my knowledge of electronics and LC circuits and basic differential equations and complex numbers, I wanted a calculator that I could use, much as I would as a teen, sitting with pen n paper and working through examples or questions. I know we have computers now and they blow calculators away functionally, but it is so much more focused to work with a dedicated calculator, or stand at my white board calculator in hand working through some calculation.
Now I did get a pretty good HP 35s calculator about a year ago, didn't use it much until recently and it is very well built, the colored keys and key quality is as good as it gets with a calculator, but the display is not lit and is rather basic LCD screen, and often a result that has lots of digits must be "scrolled" to see the full value or to see the exponent and this started to annoy me.
So I now found - and got from ebay - a very good and newer HP, the HP Prime G2 calculator, which has recently been discontinued (rumors are that HP are getting out of the calculator business).
This is after a lot of investigation, it is rated better than the top range TI graphing calculator too.
Now I can do calculations and not have to scroll the result and the display is far better than the HP 35s.
So if you're in the market for a decent real calculator I'd definitely recommended the HP Prime G2.
(I didn't buy a new one from Amazon because some of the feedback comments indicate they are not really brand new, that's pretty bad so I went to ebay and got used but in as-new condition, my unit is fine and was 30 bucks less than Amazon).
