Re: Which TI should I buy?


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Re: Which TI should I buy?



On Wed, 11 Dec 1996, Phillip D. Teeple wrote:

> I still fail to see the advantages of the 82.  The 85's menu system is so
> much better, it has a custom menu, and is much more powerful with higher
> resolution.  Why is the TI-82 better?

I prefer the pull down menus.  They make sense to me as a mathematician.

The catalog is put in there for folks who don't know enough to find what
they are looking for in a menu.  I find just knowing logically what menus
to look for things in much faster for me.  For example,
when I need to do something involving math, I hit the math button.  when I
want to deal with internal variables, I hit the VARS button.  When I want
to do manipulation in the lists, I hit the STAT or LIST button.  This to
me I would do on an 85 or an 82.  Why?  Because I know what all of the
menus actually do.  They make logical sense to me.  The catalog is a waste
of time for me because I already know what menus to find 90% of the 85's
commands.  Also, for those of us that have to regularly switch from one to
the other, it's nice to know that there is some consistency from one to
the other.  Certain commands are not the same from one to the other, but I
as a math teacher need to know both.  For example, "QUADREG" on the 82 is
the same as "P2REG" on the 85.  Scrolling through the catalog, I would
never find it, but knowing that I am evaluating statistics, I look in the
stat menu and say, "Oh, that is what it is."  If I am teaching a class and
need to do quadratic regression, and 95% of the class has TI-82's and I
tell them simply that we are going to do Quadatic Regression and that is
the QUADREG command on the 82, the 85 folks will then try scrolling
through the catalog to find it, and won't.

On top of that, the 85's menus are difficult to see, I prefer the pull
downs.  The list features and the statistical graphing (scatterplots and
the like) are much more easily analyzed on the 82 than the 85 due to one's
ability to trace on a scatterplot on the 82.

I'm not saying that the 85 isn't better in many ways than the 82, I'm just
trying to suggest that the 82 is not an inferior calculator.  More
importantly, they are different calculators.  The TI-80 is an inferior
calculator.

-- JBD


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