The best choice for a student calculator

As an initial warning, I must state that I have been using an TI-30 for the last eleven years, and I love it. This opinion may be a bit biased in favor of the TI-30.

Overview: The TI-30 is a basic scientific calculator, offering some statistics functions. Except of basic calculating, it offers logaritmical functions, simple geometric functions, and one-variable statistics. It comes in a hard case, which is being slid over the buttons.

The good: The calculator has several excellent characteristics. We will look at them in two categories - features and performance.

Features: The calculator has a scientific notation function, which can even be reversed (not a feature many calculators offer). This makes it possible to calculate numbers with up to 100 digits. The trigonometry feature, as well as the log functions, offer to invert any calculation. Furthermore, the calculator offers a factorial function, unlimited powers and roots and percentage. In other words, the calculator offers all the basic functions you might ever need at school. Because of the lack of more advanced (and mostly useless) functions, the keyboard does not look "busy", and is quite intuitive and easy to use.

A special feature is the set of simple statistic functions, offering medians, averages, and standard deviation. Even though not as used as most other function, it still provides a welcome shortcut to powering up your computer and running those functions in a spreadsheet.

Performance: The performance of this calculator is excellent. On the "software" side, the calculator has an internal memory, which remembers many more digits than displayed. This enables the calculator to avoid rounding-up problems. In fact, you have to try very hard, combining natural logs with trigonometry, to generate a small rounding error. Also, the parentheses function makes longer calculations very easy.

On the hardware side, I have rarely seen a better calculator. Due to the hard case, it is virtually unbreakable. I have been using the calculator for eleven years, during which it got banged around in my backpack and dropped numerous times, but it never broke. The battery life is excellent, too; even after those eleven years of an almost daily use, I did not have to change the batteries yet.

The bad: TI-30 has one major problem - the memory functions. Even though it boasts advanced memory functions, which enable you to add numbers to the memory, exchange numbers in the memory and much more, it is lacking the intuitiveness of simple M+, M-, MR and MC functions I am so fond of. Actually, I have never learned how to use the TI-30's memory functions properly.

The bottom line: This calculator is aimed at people with basic calculating needs, who look for good calculating capabilities, ease to use and long lifespan. It also offers a couple of useful shortcuts for basic statistical functions. This calculator is not useful for people of more advanced needs, especially those who require graphical results, and hexadecimal (for those Amiga freaks) calculations.

Disclaimer: The product reviewed was TI-30, battery version (not the one displayed in the picture). Also, the calculator reviewed was eleven years old, with the same calculating functions (compared to the current model, function by function), but with a slightly different design. As a consequence, while the description of calculating features is accurate, there might be slight differences in the sturdiness and the durability between my model and the current model.