TI-30XS Multiview Calculator

List Price: $17.99 Discount Price: $13.93

Features:

• Previous Entry - Lets you review previous entries and look for patterns.
• Menus - Easy to read and navigate pull-down menus similar to those on a graphing calculator. All mode settings are located in one central place, the mode screen.
• Fraction features - View and perform fraction computations and explorations in familiar textbook format.
• Scientific Notation Output - View scientific notation with the proper superscripted exponents and see the output in scientific notation.
• Table feature - Easily explore an (x,y) table of values for a given function, automatically or by entering specific x values

Customer Reviews:

Innovative, powerful, handy, and smart [Posted on 2007-09-21]
I recently got this exact calculator as I started up my Electronics college course. It's been nothing but amazing for me. Viewing multiple problems and answers at a time is good, but browsing your entire history with the arrow pad is great.

It intuitive too. While brosing through my previous entries, I found a few different answers that I wanted to plug in together and get the sum. I browsed my way up to one, and on a guess, hit ENTER. It placed that number in my new problem at the bottom. Okay, lets see if it will do it again... I hit PLUS, then browsed up and got another old answer. It not only remembered what I'd input so far on the new problem, but put my next selection exactly where I hoped! All this is probably in the manual, but this is so well designed, there are many cases like this example where things just work out the way I think they should.

One negative on this calculator is the CLEAR button and the DELETE button. I'm glad they spaced them apart, but they put the CLEAR button where I would think they'd put DELETE. And vice versa. I've looked at other Texas Instrument calculators, and this seems to be the convention... maybe it's just me.

I appreciate their use of the button "x10^n" instead of the "EE" button. I had no idea what EE would be without finding it in the manual, but I knew right away what to expect when I hit x10^n.

Lastly, this calculator's design and wording have been a great stepping stone for me, to get past the gap between dinky little arithmatic calculators and heavy-duty graphing calculators.

Highly recommended. Incredible buy.

complex fractions made simple [Posted on 2007-10-16]
I picked this up halfway through the semester of a University level Descriptive Chemistry course. More intuitive than other TI calcs. I wish I had this 2 months ago, I can arrange problems as they appear on my paper. Wrong answers due to forgotten parenthesis, are one less thing to worry about.

Nice calc - but not for gift [Posted on 2007-12-12]
The calculator is very nice for the money as others have written. However, don't buy this to give as a gift. It arrives in a bubble wrap bag and that's it. No manual, no box, not even blister pack. Way too cheap looking to give as a gift since it looks like you're giving a used item.

Amazon help line was poor: "Download a manual." Yes, I know I can do that but that didn't answer the question, why no packaging. I'm sure TI doesn't sell them in the store like that.

Really nice calculator [Posted on 2008-03-01]
Texas Instruments came late to the game with this MultiView idea (or WriteView or whatever you want to call it). Apparantly, they decided Casio was eating into this corner of their market share so they rushed this little baby out. It has a few little issues. For example, number squared to the fifth power looks exactly the same as number to the 25th power! Not exactly a "bug" I guess, but definitely an issue already addressed and solved in the Casio/Sharp GoodView(TM) models.

So they made up for it with hardware! This little baby has the nicest keyboard and display I've seen on any calculator. The keyboard reminds me an old IBM selectric, except with shorter strokes. It's as good as any older HP model in my opinion (but different), and you get a nice satisfying CLICK on every press. You always know your keystroke was completed and you'll never get a double entry. And the display is large, with great contrast control, easily viewable from any angle.

I have a lot of calculators laying around here, but for simple math I find myself grabbing the TI-30XS more and more often. I suspect they're losing money on the hardware. Either that, or I just lucked out with my turn at the assembly line, or they've come up with some revolutionary new manufacturing techniques. For me, it was steal.

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