new Casio’s fx-CG50

[Dave Britten]

I picked one up just a couple weeks ago too. I've already got a 9860G Slim (thanks to whomever that was that brought it to the HHC 2017 door prize table), and a pair of 9860GIIs that I scored for $17 each on clearance at Wal-Mart. I really like Casio's geometry app and its constraint-based design, and wanted to have that with a hi-res color screen (as well as having some simple color capabilities in the spreadsheet, which is very basic, but still useful).

So far, the Prizm is basically a 9860GII with a better screen, more flash RAM, enhanced connectivity, and a 3D graphing app (which, with the 3.11 update, allows for graphing arbitrary functions of z=f(x,y), or in parametric form expressing x, y, and z in terms of t).

I've always liked the Casios for number crunching, because they're very fast and responsive, have a pretty intuitive UI, and nice "math-print" input. Casio BASIC leaves something to be desired, particularly in terms of terminal I/O, but it gets the job done. I haven't tried the C/C++ SDK yet.

Some of the things I discovered after getting my hands on it:

No connectivity software required. It mounts itself like a flash drive, and you can transfer files, and also import/export programs and data in text/CSV formats. Having to go into the link menu, enter PC link mode, wait for it to initialize, do your transfers, and unmount is a little more cumbersome than just clicking a "Send" button in some connectivity software, but not having to rely on 3rd-party connectivity software is nice. It's a bit like the DM-42 in that respect.

The colored parentheses are awesome. The Prime and TI-84 CE need to steal this feature. When entering an expression in a program or other non-math-print input, the parentheses are all colored based on nesting depth. The outermost parentheses are blue, with red inside that, then green, etc.

The screen is somewhat trans-reflective, and very visible even in bright sunlight.