Best calculator for the working engineer

[damaltor]

I would recommend the wp34s which is a beautiful and very, very capable calculator, but you have to live with using LOTS of menus. The functionalities are great, but so many that even three (!) shift keys are not near to enough for all of them. This means that you will have to remember the names of some functions, too if you do not want to scrool through single line menus forever. This is the drawback of the display HP decided to use on the 30b.
The WP34S is built on a HP 20b/30b platform. The 30b has a decent keyboard which is not as good as the old ones, but still not that bad. The calculator will probably not last forever due to a not too bad, but compared to the old devices flimsy hardware.

Alternatively, get a hp 15C. Programming is a bit tedious, but easy. After using it a while you will recognize the keycodes without much searching. No graphical capabilities though. I would prefer an old 15C which you can overclock fairly easy to make it fast and more usable. Those tend to get expensive.

Alternatively, get a 50g. BIG thing, tons of functions, keyboard not that bad. No need to talk about that more, because of the earlier posts.

You also might think about a HP 48G. They sell cheap on TAS, work nice, and the RAM can be upgraded on the GX models. I also made a PCB a while ago which boosts the 48G (without X) to more than 2 MB of RAM. This is probably one of the best calculators HP ever made, but it has one single drawback: it is SLOW for anything that is not happening on the stack (e.G. graphing or menu navigation is a pain). This can be partially made better by using tools like speedui, metakernel or java which speed up the system a lot.