Recommendations for RPN Calculators?

sg3000 asks: "My trusty old HP 48S graphing calculator, that served me since engineering school, seems to be giving up the ghost. I haven't used it in a few years, but recently I put new batteries in it. It works, but it makes a loud static/white noise sound when it's on. The noise is not as noticeable when I hold it, but when I set it down on a hard surface, it's really loud. Then it sucks the batteries down incredibly fast (I put new batteries in it, and two days later, they were drained). Any suggestions on what I should buy as a replacement?"

"I'm in graduate school now, and since I'm taking an accounting course, where they don't want us digging out our laptops during a test, I need to buy another calculator. I'm a big fan of reverse polish notation (RPN), so I'd prefer to get another HP calculator.

Do companies still make calculators? I'd love to get another HP 48, but I'm not even sure if HP even makes calculators like that any longer -- on their web site, they're all cheapo-looking single line deals. I've read about something called an HP 48g, but HP has nothing about it on their web site."

Re:Real Soon Now

[GarthSweet]

Slow!?!? Compared to what, your brain, a pencil and paper? It should beat both of those. A PC? Yes, it is slower than that. If you are doing the quantity and depth of calculations on the HP48 where it's speed is an impact then you are using it for the wrong job. It's like using an electric drill as a hammer. My 2 cents. P.S. My HP48sx is still going strong after almost 10 years.

Do You Have a PalmPilot?

[ewhac]

If you have a PalmPilot, you might consider RPN [nthlab.com]. Given your stated requirements, it may not be powerful enough, but it's served me well.

Schwab

Re:Brief HP calculator guide

[ewhac]

The RPNs worth buying are:

16C - awesome calculator for programmers, especially embedded work. There is no better number system converter available at any price. [ ... ]

I've had one of these for -- can I say this? -- about 20 years. I think I changed the three button cells once in that time. The thing is still on my desk, and it still works. And you're right, the thing is great. I find the lack of scientific functions a bit of a drawback, though.

15C - same form factor as 16C. At the time HP's top scientific.

Yes. I wish I'd had the foresight to get one of these as well.

Out of curiosity, why do you not mention the HP 41-C/CV? A friend of mine gave me one as a gift recently, and it's still a darned fine piece of equipment.

Schwab

Re: TI's have RPN?

[ari_j]

Prefering something doesn't make you stupid. Ignorance of the single most important feature that the author asked for does. This is like the car dealer hearing you need four-wheel drive and a V8 and suggesting you get a sports car. Both good, but one is nothing at all like what you wanted.

Re:HP 48GX

[Henry V .009]

I am all agreed on the Fiona is a bitch link. But I thought that HP committed the travesty of killing of its wonderful calculator line before Fiona took charge. I may be wrong.

Regardless, HP created the greatest engineering calculators ever made. TI just doesn't cut it--their calculators are for students. What does a student need with a graphing calculator anyway? He should be learning to multiply, divide, and take the square roots of insanely large numbers in his head. That's what school is all about. (That's an overstatement, but still, most of the advanced functions on a graphing calculator are a damaging crutch until you have learned the stuff. Until you are past differential equations, you shouldn't be using anything more than a scientific calculator. And in any advanced math course after that, you barely need any calculator at all. Engineering and Physics are different stories.)

Graphing or not?

[kinema]

Do you need a graphing calculator? If not go for HP's 32SII. I have one that I carry pretty much everywhere with me (my 48GX is a bit bulky and usually overkill).

On the other hand if you need to be able to graph get a HP 48G or 48GX. The GX is expandable but in my experience most people never end up using the expansion packs. Also HP is scheduled to release their new 49G+. Don't let the name fool you though. It is more like a 48 then a 49. None of thoes crappy soft-touch rubber buttons. Also it is based on some ARM processor that will be *much* faster then the 48s and 49.

What ever you do, stay HP. HP builds the best damn calculators on the market.

Some alternatives...

[pongo000]

I'm afraid you're out of luck if you're looking for a new HP graphing calc. The HP32SII is nice, and there are still some sources around the internet (Amazon used to carry them), but it doesn't graph. The TI-83+ isn't a bad graphing calc, especially if you install this, [ticalc.org]
a slick RPN emulator...it preserves all the functionality of the TI-83+ while giving you the standard 4-register stack-based RPN functionality.

Re:TI-83

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't do RPN, but that's an antiquated system and you'd do well to rid yourself of it

...said the clueless troll. If you don't use it, you don't understand. Until you understand, don't criticise.

Re:What's with RPN?

[pHDNgell]

Because it's really efficient to input data and perform operations with RPN, but maintaining an application written in something like forth is difficult.

It's the same reason I live in tcsh, but write all my shell scripts using sh.

Re:HP 48GX

[homer_ca]

Back in the day (1989) you could run Mathematica on a 68030 Mac or Next cube. That's a little more processor power as a Palm III (except no FPU). Display, UI and storage are another matter, but there's still no reason why a 400Mhz PDA can't run something like Mathematica even with software floating point.

Calculator Firmware

[Detritus]

When you buy a calculator, you aren't just buying a generic handheld computer, you are buying a mathematical software package. I don't know about TI, but HP has invested many years of effort by HP mathematicians and engineers in designing, implementing and testing the software that runs on their calculators. That is what is valuable, not the near-obsolete hardware that the calculator is built from.

Re:Keypresses

[RevRigel]

I don't know what the hell you're talking about regarding RPN taking too long to learn. I'd never heard anything about it except it being hard to use when I bought my HP 48GX at the beginning of my junior year of high school, and I had RPN licked within five minutes of getting the calculator out of the store, while driving to dinner with my parents. I can barely add numbers on a TI calc, but I can fly on my HP.

Re:Keypresses

[Bingo Foo]

It's not about saving keypresses. Lisp fanatics tolerate parentheses-and-long-hyphenated-function-names because the language is beautiful. RPN users who are honest with themselves (like me) will admit that entering calculations in a Forth-like syntax is aesthetically satisfying, and reason enough to prefer that method.

Re:Keypresses

[Anonymous Coward]

Sheesh!!! The beauty of RPN is not in how many keypresses you may are may not save. The beauty of RPN is the large stack you have that you can store partial results of calculations that you need to come back to later. Most non-RPN calculators can only store one, possible a few values in memory using their "M" key for later use. For longer calculations this is just insufficient. The beauty of RPN is you can store huge amounts of numbers on the stack. This is where I find RPN calculators are far, far, far superior to your standard calculator.