How many of you prefer the Prime's Base Conversion to the 50g?

[Dave Britten]

I'm not a huge fan of either, to be honest. On the 50G, you have to prefix all your numbers with #, which is two more keystrokes. You also have to make extensive use of user keys if you don't want to have to use Alpha to enter hex, or rummage around various menus for logical and bit operations.

At least with something like the 20S or 32SII, you can switch bases with 2 keystrokes, and enter hex without any shift/alpha work, although they're lacking in any logical or bitwise operations.

The 16C ticks nearly all the boxes, but I've always found that scrolling the display for viewing large numbers is unnecessarily clumsy.

My preferred setup is actually the Casio CM-100. One key to switch bases, one key to scroll the display (with good on-screen indication of which block you're looking at), primary A-F keys, primary logical ops, and 2 keys for shifts and rotates. The 32-bit word size maximum may be a turnoff for some, though. A lot of Casio's early scientific and graphing calculators (the one's predating the use of any on-screen menus, and where everything is right on the keyboard) come close to this setup.