What HP calculator should I buy

[Dave Britten]

(01-23-2017 04:33 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  And regarding the Hp50, my personal alternative - I know, this is heresy here - would be a Ti89 or Voyage 200. Instead of the awkward RPL (you either love it or you hate it...) they are programmed in Basic.

Not a totally ridiculous suggestion, though I wouldn't recommend the 89 for day-to-day number crunching. They took the 92 Plus OS, which was heavily designed around having a full QWERTY keyboard present, and crammed it into a more traditional calculator layout. There are some very odd omissions on the keyboard that force you to go digging through menus, and the alpha key arrangement is rather bizarre, with X, Y, Z, and T being pulled out from the rest of the flow. It all makes it very unpleasant to do basic calculation, though programming isn't too bad if you can get ahold of one of the external keyboards that TI used to sell.

I would opt for the Voyage 200, which doesn't suffer from the crippled keyboard. Either model has a very nice programming system, though.

Now, the HP 48 is pretty much the king of unit conversions, and the 50 should be about the same in that regard. Personally, I find he 48 a lot more pleasant to use, as it has much better keyboard and menu layouts, and a 48SX is what I keep on my desk.

You may also want to take a look at what Swiss Micros is doing. The DM41L is a (faster) clone of the 41CX, and they've got the DM42 coming out likely this year, which will be like a 42S on steroids (it's running Free42 with customizations under the hood, so no hardware emulation overhead).