Sharp EL-W506T vs. Sharp EL-W516T

[Mjim]

My first post here, but it seems hard to find a good active forum for chatting about calculators and this seems to be pretty active. I mostly mess around with Casio & Sharp as they seem to be plenty good enough for my purpose at the moment, but I do have an HP49G+ (which I am horrid at using, I did a few tutorials on RPN and I do like it, but I can't seem to help accidentally clearing the stack all the time), although as I gain a bit more mathematical knowledge I'll have to revisit using that again.

Hopefully doesn't get flagged as spam, but I think it's likely the EL-W506T & EL-W516T are identical much like the EL-W506X & EL-W516X that came before. There is room for doubt, but the product guide (Page 32) on Sharp's website list the EL-W506T as having 640 functions which from what I can see is the same as the Sharp EL-W516T.

Here is a link to that product guide as well as some other useful stuff, though it is easy enough to google:
http://www.sharp-calculators.com/en/cont...-downloads

I'll recommend grabbing the Operational guide for the EL-W506T as this has a bit more detail then the bundled instruction manual. There are still some holes though; for example I hear complaints with the Sharp's constant 'k' ability which is only mentioned in passing. Check out https://global.sharp/contents/calculator...index.html for a better idea of what causes 'k' to appear.

Even has an emulator for the EL-W506T (no apparent time limit like the Casio emulators).

It's worth noting that the EL-W506T loses the 4 formula storage memories. Personally I think that is a rather understated downgrade, as the amount of lines stored in multi-line playback is dependent on the size of the formulas and numbers entered. For example this equation will only allow about 2 lines of multi-line playback (everything to the right of the integral, the left is just the Sharp equivalent to the right (The Sharp EL-W506X/T uses the Simpson algorithm for estimating definite integrals):



b = upper limit, a = lower limit, d = number of double divisions to use for the interval (Simpson's needs to have divisions that are multiples of 2, so if d=64, we actually break up the graph into 128 chunks to calculate the area).

When dealing with big formula's the last thing you want to be doing is retyping in them, so if you want to use that formula again, you need to keep scrolling up to run the equation to make sure it stays in memory. Being able to store 4 big equations like these completely removes any apprehension of accidentally pushing your formula off the multi-line 'stack'.

Looking at the manual, the buffer is about 159 characters, so since this equation is pretty close to that limit, 2 entries matches up with the 340 characters or so quoted for multi-line playback for the EL-W506X/516X. With 4 function memories that extends the effective memory close to a thousand.

That being said, the implementation of the table function on the EL-W506T is very well done, it just calculates as it goes, so there is no limit to what you can view, set the starting interval, interval size and away you go. I recommend giving the emulator a whirl to see how it works.