Thank you very very much all of you. Sorry for replying a bit late but I was busy with some of my assignments. Now that I have checked back, i was surprised by the number of generous replies and the amount of information you guys provided me. I have taken the notes and will go to market in a day or two to have a hands on experience and buy one. Thanks again. you guys ROCK!

Hello evry1, I need to buy a calculator. I m a freshman in BE electronics. Here we have a good range of casio calculators in market. I am confused. Kindly help me out which one to choose that will help me in my field. We also have subjects like applied physics, calculus etc. Thanks in advance... A lot of people will tell you a programable RPN Hewlett Packard or TI. Forgot it, cool toys, but for everyday use they are stupidly complex to use. You need a basic direct entry Casio *without* the new VPAM rubbish or whatever it is they call it that allows you to enter formula on a seperate LCD line. A standard single line LCD 12+2digit is what you need. The best casio calculator for electronics is the FX-61F, it has inbuilt electronics stuff and a very handy parallel key etc, designed specifically for electronics use. Not made any more I don't think, but you can probably get one on eBay. But any general Casio will be plenty, just make sure it has seperate 1/x, SQRT, +/-, X^2, Log, ln, X^Y, EXP, and ENG/-ENG keys, they are the most used for general electronics work. Having to press the INV button before such common operations is a just a real pain. Most will have BIN/HEX/OCT/DEC conversion and R-P and P-R functions which are handy. By all means get a real fancy programmable toy, but have a nice simple Casio as well for the simple stuff which will be 99% of your work. Dave Get a HP 28s on ebay for $25 with two 350 page manuals. Does everything, graphs, equations, programs, games, converts units, and has 32K memory. It's a stack computer that can accept a few hundred entries on the stack to manipulate in different ways. Also has a solver function where the function keys represent different variables of an equation, so you can just change one variable value to get a new answer. It's a blast, I love it. It's the last calculator I will ever need. -Bill I already own a HP28S, and have owned seveal other model HP's over the years. The 28S sits on the shelf gathering dust because for everyday electronics design use it's a pain in the butt to use and incredibly inefficient. Direct Algebraic Casio's are by far more efficient and intuitive, and the buttons you need to use every day don't need a shift function or some other convoluted method to call up. I've explored and used both architectures with an open mind for the past 15 years and my conclusion is you simply can't beat the Casio for everyday engineering use IMHO. Dave Just out of curiosity, how many key strokes does the Casio require to solve an equation, other than entering the data? Take a compound interest problem for example where P = P*(1+R) ^Y The HP 28s allows a function key to be defined to process that formula _base_d on the lower 3 entries on the stack. So, all I have to do is enter 3 numbers (principal, rate, and years) and then press one function key to get the answer. $100 at 6% for 10 years is $179. How easy is it to do with the Casio calculator? -Bill

Hello evry1, I need to buy a calculator. I m a freshman in BE electronics. Here we have a good range of casio calculators in market. I am confused. Kindly help me out which one to choose that will help me in my field. We also have subjects like applied physics, calculus etc. Thanks in advance... A lot of people will tell you a programable RPN Hewlett Packard or TI. Forgot it, cool toys, but for everyday use they are stupidly complex to use. You need a basic direct entry Casio *without* the new VPAM rubbish or whatever it is they call it that allows you to enter formula on a seperate LCD line. A standard single line LCD 12+2digit is what you need. The best casio calculator for electronics is the FX-61F, it has inbuilt electronics stuff and a very handy parallel key etc, designed specifically for electronics use. Not made any more I don't think, but you can probably get one on eBay. But any general Casio will be plenty, just make sure it has seperate 1/x, SQRT, +/-, X^2, Log, ln, X^Y, EXP, and ENG/-ENG keys, they are the most used for general electronics work. Having to press the INV button before such common operations is a just a real pain. Most will have BIN/HEX/OCT/DEC conversion and R-P and P-R functions which are handy. By all means get a real fancy programmable toy, but have a nice simple Casio as well for the simple stuff which will be 99% of your work. Dave Get a HP 28s on ebay for $25 with two 350 page manuals. Does everything, graphs, equations, programs, games, converts units, and has 32K memory. It's a stack computer that can accept a few hundred entries on the stack to manipulate in different ways. Also has a solver function where the function keys represent different variables of an equation, so you can just change one variable value to get a new answer. It's a blast, I love it. It's the last calculator I will ever need. -Bill I already own a HP28S, and have owned seveal other model HP's over the years. The 28S sits on the shelf gathering dust because for everyday electronics design use it's a pain in the butt to use and incredibly inefficient. Direct Algebraic Casio's are by far more efficient and intuitive, and the buttons you need to use every day don't need a shift function or some other convoluted method to call up. I've explored and used both architectures with an open mind for the past 15 years and my conclusion is you simply can't beat the Casio for everyday engineering use IMHO. Dave Just out of curiosity, how many key strokes does the Casio require to solve an equation, other than entering the data? Take a compound interest problem for example where P = P*(1+R) ^Y The HP 28s allows a function key to be defined to process that formula _base_d on the lower 3 entries on the stack. So, all I have to do is enter 3 numbers (principal, rate, and years) and then press one function key to get the answer. $100 at 6% for 10 years is $179. How easy is it to do with the Casio calculator? Trick question. Normals DAL Casio's *aren't* programmable, and that example really requires a programmable calculator, so it's not a relevant question. In that case I'd use Excel or get a programable calculator. I'm not saying that a DAL Casio takes the place of a good programmable calculator, it clearly doesn't. It's just that in my experience, 99.9% of the time I pick up a calculator for engineering use I only need to do basic math that a DAL Casio is ideally suited for. That's why I have both, but the HP28S gathers dust and the Casio gets used every day. Your millage may vary of course... Dave

[snip...snip...] Direct Algebraic Casio's are by far more efficient and intuitive, and the buttons you need to use every day don't need a shift function or some other convoluted method to call up. I've explored and used both architectures with an open mind for the past 15 years and my conclusion is you simply can't beat the Casio for everyday engineering use IMHO. I agree, with the caveat that most (all?) of the little Casios have a radix mode that is separate from the normal algebraic mode. That is, if I grind through a gain calculation to a voltage divider and then an A/D scaling, I can't just poke a convert this result to hex key. Switching to radix mode clears the accumulator, so there's an extra, annoying step to re-enter the remembered decimal result and then do the _base_ conversion (and an additional opportunity for operator error). A bit annoying, but that's what the memory key is for, no operator error possible there. Many Casios will also have 6 additional constant memories to hold temporay stuff like that in complex work where the one memory key is not enough. Dave

I already own a HP28S, and have owned seveal other model HP's over the years. The 28S sits on the shelf gathering dust because for everyday electronics design use it's a pain in the butt to use and incredibly inefficient. You wouldn't happen to have a like new HP32S in a drawer, somewhere, would you? I would give you a fair price for it.

I already own a HP28S, and have owned seveal other model HP's over the years. The 28S sits on the shelf gathering dust because for everyday electronics design use it's a pain in the butt to use and incredibly inefficient. You wouldn't happen to have a like new HP32S in a drawer, somewhere, would you? I would give you a fair price for it. No, sorry. I had a HP42s but sold it a few years back. Bought it for $5 at a pawn shop! It didn't have many buttons so they figured it wasn't worth much! Dave