new Casio’s fx-CG50

[Chasfield]

I just bought a Casio fx-CG50 for my birthday treat. I have resuscitated this thread to save starting another.

The Basic interpreter is surprisingly slow, despite the 116 MHz system clock. I ran a couple of small Basic program fragments to benchmark it against my ageing fx-9860G Slim monochrome unit.

1) Iterate 10,000 addition operations:

fx-9860G Slim, 14 seconds
fx-CG50, 21 seconds

2) Plot 2500 pixels in a 50x50 square:

fx-9860G Slim, 107 seconds
fx-CG50, 230 seconds

The results are disappointing with respect to basic number crunching and a deal breaker for my plan to code a Moonlander program in full colour!

I guess the graphics performance reflects the need to update 16 bits per pixel rather than just one. However, I was surprised that the calculation performance was so low.

The calculator has some good points:

The familiar workman-like Casio OS, which I have spent many hours messing around with; the display is great, with a nice large screen font; the unit pops up as a USB mass storage device when it is connected to a PC.

The last point is important because I think you now have to pay a subscription to Casio for their fancy calculator management software.

I quite like the thing for what it is but I am further convinced that the HP Prime is the only graphical calculator that is actually worth buying.