Re: I always knew TI's were backwards.... Message #11 Posted by Joerg Woerner on 9 Jan 2003, 3:04 p.m., in response to message #10 by Michel Beaulieu
NO, NO, NO !!!!
OLD TI calculator feel very strong ! Let us define old. If you ever owned a TI-2500 Datamath or a SR-50, SR-51 - they feel very, very strong.
If you dismantle (like I did often) a SR-50 and a HP35 you won't find ANY difference in quality.
TI used that time tons of screws, gold platen contacts, rigid printed circuit boards - like HP did. Unfortunately there was a lot of really cheap competition like APF, Commodore, National Semi and some others and the price war started.
TI made a lot of steps to lower manufacturing costs and starting with the SR-50A/51A the product quality decreased. You know the TI-30 with the bouncing keyboard, the TI-55 II with the rusty contacts, unusable after some weeks of use...
But - they learned a lot - and they learned early enough:
The technology behind the TI-55 III (Far East replacement of the US TI-55 II)is more solid than a HP-30S.
A TI-89 has a better look-and-feel compared to ALL Sharp, Casio and even some (newer) HP graphing calculators.
Within some weeks I'll visit Thailand - the home country of Citizen brand. On my shopping list are some Citizen calculators, we discussed already here in the Forum that the HP9 series are rebadged Citizen's.(Side questions: WAS the HP9 EVER AVAILABLE IN US ????).
Later more - if you are interested.
If you need some info about the a.m. TI's - just visit www.datamath.org and search them.
Greetings from Germany, Joerg
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