HP50g spins circles around the TI-89

[peacecalc]

Hello folks,

why such battles? microsoft against apple, hp against ti, prime against hp50g.

I'm sorry, it is a little bit annoying. A calculator is a very special hardware with a certain concept behind the build and construction.
Everybody here in this forum has certain needs for such a machine. Take the one which is best for you and be happy.

TI rules in nowadays the classrooms (CAS + graphic) together with Casio. It is up to HP to change it, if this is wanted by the management. A teacher e needs another machine as an engineer (or don't laugh: pupil or a student).

The highest obstacle for teaching mathematics with an CAS calculator (or software) is the human-machine interface (if the problems or input isn't too simple).
For this you have three problems: Easy and fast input (in my eyes only possible with a formula recognition program and a pen tablet-like surface). The second one is a human memory supporting output. If you use a CAS calc you must have a plan in mind witch reflects the starting point, the goal and on which way you want to go.
With easy and short calculations it is no problem, but if you need more steps for transforming mathematical terms, then it is a nice feature having a look back to former steps (with the hp50g you can simulate this with doubling the term before the next calculation, but better would be a scrolling screen). The last one is you have to learn commands and a syntax using this (and this is in my experience a difficult point for the beginners, because you have to understand a kind of meta-mathematics and which concept is behind the commands, especially when the output is not that one expected). So it is a need for standardized commands (with public concepts how they worked).

I suppose if a tablet (include an easy data transfer possiblity) has such features you can forget every CAS calculator with RPL or not.

[Sukiari]

(04-30-2015 04:45 PM)Gerald H Wrote:  Manolo correctly criticises the build quality of the 50g, but what about the 49G? That model has its problems, but I haven't read of people criticising it for poor construction nor of it failing to work correctly.

I've used mine for c 15 years with no material problems - does anyone have a different experience?

I have to say that every 48 series machine I have run across creaks and groans. The 10c series, and the 71b, seem to be the most robust HPs ever built. The 50G seems like a quality improvement over the 48s though.

TI has made a more robust calc since the TI-95 days for sure. Those TIs, even with their somewhat iffy non-tactile keyboards, are really impressive from a durability standpoint.

[Gerald H]

(05-01-2015 07:01 AM)Sukiari Wrote:  

(04-30-2015 04:45 PM)Gerald H Wrote:  Manolo correctly criticises the build quality of the 50g, but what about the 49G? That model has its problems, but I haven't read of people criticising it for poor construction nor of it failing to work correctly.

I've used mine for c 15 years with no material problems - does anyone have a different experience?

I have to say that every 48 series machine I have run across creaks and groans. The 10c series, and the 71b, seem to be the most robust HPs ever built. The 50G seems like a quality improvement over the 48s though.

TI has made a more robust calc since the TI-95 days for sure. Those TIs, even with their somewhat iffy non-tactile keyboards, are really impressive from a durability standpoint.

True, cases of old 48Gs creak, but the innards function well.

They're also somewhat older than the 50G.

Time will tell - 15 years now for my 49G & no problems - key markings have NOT rubbed off, contrary to predictions in 2000.

[jebem]

All good points here IMHO.

I have to express my disliking when looking to HP calculator engineering choices concerning the case/enclosure design in most of their models after the 80's.
By using rivets everywhere instead of screws, it is almost impossible to open the machines for maintenance without leaving traces of it. It will never be the same.

There is one good exception, though: The HP Prime. Easy to open and close using normal tools without leaving any trace of the operation.
(I'm excluding the original serious built Classic HP machines of course - they were built to last and to be maintained when needed).

When we look to what Casio and Texas Instruments have been doing on their most successful models since the year 2000 (Casio Algebra FX series and Texas TI-8x / Nspire series are just a few examples), we see the thinking behind the design choices.

Casio and TI design philosophy orientation allows their machines to be easily maintained, saving money from their customers.

What is the most common causes of failure?
Beverages fell down over the machine keyboard, and forgotten batteries leaking inside the machine.

I have restored so many of these machines in the last years, by just (easily) opening them, clean the offending liquids/acids/bases from the PCB's using the appropriate solutions, washing the case and keyboard plastic materials, and reassembling.
Easy as counting from 1 to 3.
In comparison, maintaining most HP machines is a nightmare.

[BartDB]

(05-01-2015 01:53 AM)Sukiari Wrote:  

(05-01-2015 01:05 AM)Marcio Wrote:  Well, it seems the calc team is working on updates, collecting bugs reported by the community etc. Why wouldn't they release it if they know the Prime needs updates (some would even say 'desperately')?

Faith is for religion, not consumer products.

I completely agree! For God I can take a step of faith, but when spending my hard earned money on a product I want evidence it will do the job.

Evidence: no updates for the HP-50G for 6 years even though there are known issues, for example:
HPCalc Bugzilla (reports specifically indicated as v2.15)
to name but a few (search internet & various forums for more).

Evidence: 1 ½ year since the last update for the HP-39Gii (a *new* HP calculator, released just before the Prime). I have one which is useless - whenever I do try to use it, it either hangs or produces errors (for example:
http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Calculators...rue#M14651
http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Calculators...701#M14103 ).

So, based on this evidence, I refuse to buy the Prime (and hesitate to purchase any other HP products - they're all managed by the same top management after all).

[Marcio]

(05-01-2015 05:05 AM)Gerald H Wrote:  

(05-01-2015 01:00 AM)Marcio Wrote:  It seems the Prime was their only alternative to compete against TI. Do you really think school kids would be able to use the 50g out of the box?

Do you really think pupils, students or calculator adepts can use the prime out of the box?

If your kid were to sit a physics test in the next couple of days. You know he knows little of math, which calculator would you give to him, the 50g or the Prime?

The 50g has a steep learning curve and assumes you know math already. The Prime, on the other hand, assumes you are a student, therefore you are learning the basics. It's a bit unlikely kids will be able to find as many bugs on the Prime because they don't have enough experience under their belts to squeeze the machine to the point it becomes useless (as many experienced 48 users have found it to be).

[BartDB]

Having started my HP journey with the HP-28C & S, the 50G was a natural progression for me.

I have worked with Sharps & Casios, but I have never gotten on with TIs (tried several).

I purchased my first 50g in 2006 and in 2009 some lines on the display stopped working. I purchased another one and that has worked fine for 6 years now.

Perhaps it is lasting this long because it has light use. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, computer and internet based mathematical programmes are starting to take over.

I opened the problem 50g and found it easy enough to open (screen connection is heatseal and not repairable - also I'm not convinced it is a connection problem).

I have repaired a few 48s and the results are quite good, but it is indeed a pain to open. I have never attempted to open a 28 and probably never will.

[Brian D]

Regarding the 50G learning curve:

I went through college with a 15C, which was great in that it has everything which you'd expect to need for calculating in engineering and science, right in front of you on the keyboard without needing to navigate any menus. I think that learning to do the same things on the 50G would take no time at all, though. I don't remember writing many complicated programs on the calculator in four years of engineering and science classes, and the matrices on the 50G would almost certainly be easier than they are on the 15C. For what we did back then, the 50G would be simple to learn.

Back then, a math class hardly every used a calculator, but engineering and science did. It would be interesting to find out exactly what is expected of a calculator in a typical class "these days".

[Omar Deen]

(05-01-2015 11:41 AM)BartDB Wrote:  Having started my HP journey with the HP-28C & S, the 50G was a natural progression for me.

I have worked with Sharps & Casios, but I have never gotten on with TIs (tried several).

I purchased my first 50g in 2006 and in 2009 some lines on the display stopped working. I purchased another one and that has worked fine for 6 years now.

Perhaps it is lasting this long because it has light use. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, computer and internet based mathematical programmes are starting to take over.
.....

My first HP calculator was a HP11c many years ago. I bought the calculator when I started my Machinist Apprenticeship program. I went through the natural progression. HP41, Hp48 series, skipped HP49 then bought a HP50g of which is the best calculator I ever owned.

In my HP48 days I had lots of time to play around with SRPL programming. I grasp it well without having any previous programming background. Although, I understood how to program my calculator in SRPL, I always took the lazy approach by using looking up tables in the Machinery handbook, Machinist APPS with formulas on my Iphone, Excel spreadsheet with machinist formulas, I even used online
calculators.

About four years ago I ran into this web site that motivated me to start writing programs for my HP50g

https://www.calculated.com/productcart/p...UQpcpOPWgQ

It's a calculator for a machinist! I realized, that over the years I have been using my HP50g the wrong way. I was motivated more than ever to write machinist package that would "spin circles around" that specialty calculator.

I've develop Machinist Helper v1.7 of which you can find on hpcalc.org. For all of my shop calculating needs, I now use Machinist Helper.

If someone have a complicated formulas for a specific application, I use Usolve of which you can find here on MoHPC

The big advantage of HP50g have over that specialty calculator is all of my thread spec data fits nicely on the HP50g screen


all in all, The HP50 Spins Circles around any calculator!
Omar

[DMaier]

(05-01-2015 11:25 AM)Marcio Wrote:  If your kid were to sit a physics test in the next couple of days. You know he knows little of math, which calculator would you give to him, the 50g or the Prime?

The 50g has a steep learning curve and assumes you know math already. The Prime, on the other hand, assumes you are a student, therefore you are learning the basics. It's a bit unlikely kids will be able to find as many bugs on the Prime because they don't have enough experience under their belts to squeeze the machine to the point it becomes useless (as many experienced 48 users have found it to be).

If the choice was limited to the 50g and the Prime (hopefully, no child will be damaged by this thought experiment), and given that physics typically involves units of measure, this might be one case where the 50g is worth the learning investment. I'm sure that any student trying to use the Prime with units of measure will quickly discover bugs that render it unusable.

However, given that every student of ordinary abilities needs to have a TI-83/84 for math class, I'd probably stick with that. The NSpire is definitely a better calculator, but the teacher will exclusively use the TI-84 for lessons in the classroom, and it's difficult for ordinary students to keep up using anything else, even another TI calculator.

[John R. Graham]

(05-01-2015 12:40 AM)Marcio Wrote:  ...and let's not forget that it took many years (more than a decade?) for the 50g to become what it is today.

Is that true, really? Out of the box, the 50g was a slightly enhanced 49g, which was itself a slightly enhanced 48G. I loved the addition of infinite precision integers that the 49 brought (but hated the keyboard) and use them often on my 50g. I found it eminently usable out of the box.

- John

[Mark Hardman]

(05-02-2015 09:50 PM)John R. Graham Wrote:  

(05-01-2015 12:40 AM)Marcio Wrote:  ...and let's not forget that it took many years (more than a decade?) for the 50g to become what it is today.

Is that true, really? Out of the box, the 50g was a slightly enhanced 49g, which was itself a slightly enhanced 48G. I loved the addition of infinite precision integers that the 49 brought (but hated the keyboard) and use them often on my 50g. I found it eminently usable out of the box.

ROM 1.05 for the 49g was released in August 1999 (Initial Release)
ROM 1.22 for the 49g+was released in September 2004
ROM 2.09 for the 49g+/50g was released in August 2006
ROM 2.15 for the 49g+/50g was released in April 2009 (Final Official Release)

Just five months shy of 10 years. If you consider the time it took to develop the 49g before its release, it is certainly more than a decade.

[Marcio]

(05-02-2015 10:34 PM)Mark Hardman Wrote:  If you consider the time it took to develop the 49g before its release, it is certainly more than a decade.

That's what I'm talking about. Thanks.

[Gerald H]

(05-02-2015 09:50 PM)John R. Graham Wrote:  

(05-01-2015 12:40 AM)Marcio Wrote:  ...and let's not forget that it took many years (more than a decade?) for the 50g to become what it is today.

Is that true, really? Out of the box, the 50g was a slightly enhanced 49g, which was itself a slightly enhanced 48G. I loved the addition of infinite precision integers that the 49 brought (but hated the keyboard) and use them often on my 50g. I found it eminently usable out of the box.

- John

It's just a quibble, but the 49G was more than slightly enhanced. Memory was greatly expanded & the exorbitantly expensive memory cards for the 48GX became redundant. How many 1 MByte cards were ever sold?

[John R. Graham]

(05-02-2015 10:34 PM)Mark Hardman Wrote:  ROM 1.05 for the 49g was released in August 1999 (Initial Release)
ROM 1.22 for the 49g+was released in September 2004
ROM 2.09 for the 49g+/50g was released in August 2006
ROM 2.15 for the 49g+/50g was released in April 2009 (Final Official Release)

Just five months shy of 10 years. If you consider the time it took to develop the 49g before its release, it is certainly more than a decade.

By that logic, my airplane (a 1959 model Cessna 170b) has taken 56 years to become what it is today as it has been continuously maintained and updated. I think this ignores the reality that it was a fine machine when it left the factory, and so was the the HP 50g.

- John

[Marcus von Cube]

(05-01-2015 10:54 AM)BartDB Wrote:  Evidence: 1 ½ year since the last update for the HP-39Gii (a *new* HP calculator, released just before the Prime). I have one which is useless - whenever I do try to use it, it either hangs or produces errors (for example:
http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Calculators...rue#M14651
http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Calculators...701#M14103 ).

I checked the first case mentioned. It boils down to a faulty implementation of LN for complex arguments. The real part is off by more than a factor 2 in this example.

[pito]

Why HP or TI or XYZ company shall consider a development, production, sales and world-wide maintenance of a stand alone calculator when:
A) today every child, pupil, college student, university student, science - engineering - math professionals carry a smartphone or a tablet with them all the time,
B) such gadgets are equipped with a beautiful >4inch color touch display, w/ at least 768MB of memory, at least 2x1.2GHz CPU, an xxGB large sdcard space, w/ wifi, 3G/4G/LTE, BT, navigation, hires cameras, etc.,etc.,
C) where the online shops offer >250 calculator apps,
D) where the development tools are free available so you can develop/sell/maintain what you want,
E) where soon (or even already today) these gadgets can run Octave, Matlab, Mathematica, or any kind of HP5X, WP4X, TI8X you can imagine..

[ElectroDuende]

(05-04-2015 12:37 PM)pito Wrote:  Why HP or TI or XYZ company shall consider a development, production, sales and world-wide maintenance of a stand alone calculator when:
A) today every child, pupil, college student, university student, science - engineering - math professionals carry a smartphone or a tablet with them all the time,
B) such gadgets are equipped with a beautiful >4inch color touch display, w/ at least 768MB of memory, at least 2x1.2GHz CPU, an xxGB large sdcard space, w/ wifi, 3G/4G/LTE, BT, navigation, hires cameras, etc.,etc.,
C) where the online shops offer >250 calculator apps,
D) where the development tools are free available so you can develop/sell/maintain what you want,
E) where soon (or even already today) these gadgets can run Octave, Matlab, Mathematica, or any kind of HP5X, WP4X, TI8X you can imagine..

Because a smartphone lacks... KEYS!

I left the University more than ten years ago, being an HP48G my "workhorse" in that moment. Most of may calculations since them have been done in the computer, either with Excel or dedicated software, and the calculators have jsut been "a hobby". I even had a 4 button cheap one as my desk calculator until I got a 30b.

But now I'm doing a post-graduate course about electricity transport lines, that has several "practical cases", and the 48 came back to rescue me... I find that I can "draft" numbers several times faster than the guys using casios or fancy calculator apps in their ipads... including a guy using "droid48" in his phone, and one of the reasons is that I can key-in values and operators without even looking at the display. Try this in a phone, with no positive feedback (no, the little vibration is not good enoug) Another reason, of course, is that I can "think in RPN(L)"... I carried the 15C one afternoon and, not missing any function, I was much slower with it! I suppose that somebody used to it sill suffer the opposite situation...

But, as usual, the main question is... Will any company recover the investment in R&D and tooling for HP35s / HP50G replacements?

[MarkMason]

(05-04-2015 01:38 PM)ElectroDuende Wrote:  ....................

But, as usual, the main question is... Will any company recover the investment in R&D and tooling for HP35s / HP50G replacements?

Perhaps if these replacements are based on the HP Prime chassis. Same key layout with (hopefully) incriptions optimized for a general purpose RPL machine.

A dream yes, but one can hope !!!!!

Mark

[AnalogJoe]

Im a hardcore HP user, I own 4 HP calculators (48GX,50G,35S,Prime), but I also own a TI Voyage 200 which is pretty much the same as the TI-89, and yes, in most cases the hp50g spins circles around my TI, but there are some things in which (IMHO) my TI calculator beats all of my HPs.

First of all: Symbolic manipulation is a lot easier on the Ti than on any HP calculator (Including my HP Prime), the HP Prime suffers from the CAS/Home incompatibility, you cant easily copy paste something from the CAS into the plot window or home, and viceversa, that is not the case on the TI's, however writting equations on any HP is a breeze compared to the TI's in which you have to use parenthesis inside parenthesis inside parenthesis inside parenthesis and non graphical notation in order to write polynomials, and such, the Equation Writter on the 50g and 48G is great, sometimes it takes some time to write an equation with it, but the reward is not having to spend minutes looking for that missing or extra parenthesis.

The "stock" equation library on the Hp50 and 48G is in my opinion inferior to the stock library on the TI Voyage, the Electrical Engineering app on my TI is overall the best and most useful app for me from of all the calculators I own, the HP Prime has a complete lack of Equation Libraries.

TIs have the advantage that you can just throw in equations written in less than ideal ways and hit solve and the TI will do all the factorizations, and operations needed to give you an answer, for example it can easily solve multiple equations with implicit variables, or even non-trascendental equations, etc, the HP50G and 48G do not do this, at least not that I know of, on the 48GX and 50G you have to tidy up your equations before you put them in. The HP Prime is more like the TI in this aspect, and far more powerful, however for some equations you have to suggest values or a method of solution on the Prime, so it requires a bit more human interaction, while the TI will do everything for you.

That being said, I find myself using the HPs 99% of the time and once every blue moon Ill bring out my Ti, however with the recent HP Prime I bought, I believe the TI will be collecting more and more dust. Of all the HPs I own, the 50G is the one which gets most use, and the 48G is the one I like the most, A 48G with a faster CPU would be the best calc in the world.

In any case, for me the TI VS HP debate boils down to a single thing: RPN, I feel sick just to think about all the parenthesis and order of operation I have to use on a non-RPN calculator. In fact im completely crippled if I try to use a non-RPN calc, I will try to use it as an RPN calc and just end up wasting time on my exams!