Solar-powered calculators

[Dave Britten]

(05-01-2020 01:11 PM)johanw Wrote:  My second calculator in Highschool, the first one I bought myself, was a Casio FX-98: a solar only scientific calculator in credit card format so I could carry it easily in my shirt pocket instead of my bag. I still have it and it still works, although I switched to Free42 on Android as my main calculator now.

That's a nice little tiny one.

I got a Casio fc-200V in the mail today, which is one of only a very small number of solar-powered (battery-assisted) financial calculators. It's got a lot of features, but the interface is a little clumsy, with a lot of using the up and down arrow keys to scroll through the different solvers and menus. So not as elegant to use as the original fc-200 (which has almost nothing in common apart from being another financial model), nor is it programmable like the fc-200, but it's certainly got a lot of functionality crammed into it. The two Shortcut keys are particularly handy: you can open up the various solver applications and store a shortcut to that application along with all the variable values. So pressing Shortcut 1 could take you directly to the compound interest (TVM) mode and recall a set of saved values of all the TVM variables.