Need advice from Engineers who are also TI users

[Dave Britten]

Oh, I neglected to mention that the Casio fx-9860gii is definitely worth a look. It's much faster than a TI-83 or 86, and the screen has much higher contrast, plus a backlight. And it does math print input, which you won't get on the older TIs.

It does have a couple of drawbacks vs. a TI, though:

- No multi-character variable names like the 86.
- Programming is a little obnoxious; there's nothing like the Disp command on a TI. If you want to show something on the screen, you can either write it to specific X,Y coordinates, or you can use the little triangle command that prints something terminal-I/O style, but also pauses the program until you hit Enter. The ? command for user input is similarly lacking in flexibility.

But the built-in software is excellent, and includes unit conversions, binary math, finance, statistics, plenty of graphing options, a pretty usable (if very basic) spreadsheet, etc.