Build Quality of Graphing Calcs & Others

[Dave Britten]

My experience is that Casios tend to have the best build quality and longevity, with TI not too far behind in second place. Casios on ebay almost always work, or just need some battery contact cleaning. I've only run across a couple I couldn't resurrect.

TIs are much more prone to having dead rows/columns, at least on the graphing models with dot-matrix displays, though I don't run across a lot that are outright dead. More recent models seem better in this regard, though it could just be they aren't old enough for the screen connections to have degraded yet.

Sharps tend to be the worst by far - I have at least 6 or 7 of their first-gen graphing models (EL-9200, EL-9300), most of them are completely non-functional, a few barely work, and maybe one of them is remotely reliable. Later models seem a bit better, but I don't have a big enough sample to paint in broad strokes here. I have an EL-9900 that definitely has some screen issues though. Haven't seen any major problems with their non-graphing models, aside from some software design quirks.