Thinking of acquiring new Sharp (gasp!!) model

[Dave Britten]

It's alright, but I think the EL-W516 models have more functions. I'd recommend looking for one of the older versions of the 516 that has F1, F2, F3, F4 functions on the arrow keys, as these ones let you save a few formulas in memory. Personally, I haven't really found anything that the Sharps do particularly better than the competing Casio and TI models. Unless you really need that weird "pental" mode that Sharp supports.