Re: HP33s - a true confession Message #44 Posted by Ed Look on 24 Nov 2006, 1:07 p.m., in response to message #1 by Les Wright
Les, I was one of the early bigmouths who trashed the arrangement of the keyboard on the 33S; in fact, if I'm not hollowly boasting, I suspect I might have been (one of the?) first to dub a "chevron", in a whining lament to the legendary Norm about it. And, I think I also might have said that I was going to hate it.
I bought one nevertheless.
But it turned out that my ONLY real complaint was the small decimal point! (Old eyes and all that... ) It evokes (yes, I still use it often, though as a scientist rather than an engineer, my pounding on it will be lighter than yours) the feel (almost) of an old HP-34C, my all-time favorite calculator, for its balance of power and ease of use.
The 33S is indeed fast, packed with features, even a few my beloved old 34C didn't have, such as dedicated memory space for an equation library, a preloaded constants library (which I do make use of), and really, sufficient programming space AND labels... I mean, if you need more programming power, the machine you should look to would be more like a 48S or G series, 49/50G series, etc.
In fact, that's what I do- I use my 33S for most calculations and shorter, quicker programs while the 48G and G+ and 49G+ are used for more involved programs (oh yeah, I finally [last night, actually, after Thanksgiving dinner] finished and corrected my program to calculate the Miller indices of cubic [any lower symmetry unit cells I leave to you engineers... maybe a physicist :) ] crystal planes from the x-ray powder pattern... unfortunately, you have to know beforehand the lattice parameter and stick it in the program code first; maybe I'll try to allow for user entry of that datum tonight... ) because the FORTRAN-like (okay, FORTH or LISP-like) programming language of these latter, larger (in memory as well as physical dimension) graphing machines makes it easier to do so on them.
All in all, I think I much prefer to generally use the HP-33S much more over a 48, 49/50 or such. Besides, I either "graph" on a computer or (still) by hand on paper. The dinky little calculator screen sizes almost defeat the purpose and power of a graphing calculator. (Maybe HP or TI or Sharp or Casio can come up with a unit that will allow calc signals to be either IR transmitted or by cable to a TV!! lol.)
(Oh, by the way, if anyone wants the program posted here somewhere, it's my only one I'm not ashamed to do so, so let me know!)
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