<p>I’d go with the TI89, it’s a great calculator with a lot of functionality - especially the calculus functions, statistics functions, and eqn solver (it does symbolic eqn solving).</p>
<p>It was clutch in courses such as dynamics, machine design, kinematics, thermo, heat transfer, for those MEs out there. </p>
<p>In my university studies, we were never allowed to use calculators in math courses, but I can see why…hard to learn to integrate and differentiate when your calculator can do it for you!</p>
<p>If you go buy a copy of “Essential Mathcad” by Brent Maxfield, you will get a full version of Mathcad 14 (noncommercial license) for the grand total price of 50 bucks or so. It will blow away any TI or HP calculator.</p>
<p>Just got a used HP-50G and I love it, even though I’ve hardly done anything with it. I love the “equation writer.” Makes entering a big mathematical expression with lots of nested roots and parentheses and so forth extremely easy.</p>
<p>Don’t get a calculator and think it is going to take the test for you. Most teachers let you bring all your class notes, calculator, and lunch if you want while taking tests. They are testing your knowledge and programming your calculator to give you the answers won’t help if you don’t understand the material. My recommendation is to wait and see what other use and ask your professors what they recommend. It’s like buying text books. I purchased so many texts which were “required” only to find the teachers never used them and I only needed them for a reference occasionally.</p>
<p>I’d say get a symbolic equation solving calculator. It saves a lot of time and it helps you when you’re doing homework to check your answers. Not only that, but the ti83/84 has a bit of an annoying interface. With a ti89, you can do all the algebraic stuff that you can do but it would be much more efficient to just do on a calculator (complicated factoring, finding roots of equations vs. doing quadratic equation, plugging numbers for variables easily…).</p>
<p>Of course, still learn all your stuff, that’s very important. But I’d say get a ti89, much better than ti84 since it’ll definitely help you in calculus with, if nothing else, checking your answers.</p>
<p>When someone recommends the ti89, ask them if they have ever used the HP 50g. Once you start with HP calcs, you’re not going to recommend TI again.</p>
<p>Sure. But all my friends had used ti89s and I simply had gotten semi-used to it. Didn’t really feel like getting anything different since it’d be too much hassle. Clearly it seems like the HP is better, so you could probably stick with that one.</p>
<p>Mango, I’d hold off until you got to school. In the first two years I’ve never had a need for a Ti-89, especially if you have a smart phone and you can get the wolfram alpha app. Most schools won’t let you use a Ti-89 in your first two years.</p>
<p>@ripemango, My school doesn’t allow the use of a TI-89 for physics, chemistry, or math courses, which is probably what you’ll be taking for your first year or two as a ChemE. Ti-84 is just fine for now.</p>
<p>I use the HP35 and I love it. I love RPN mode, as it makes calculations so much easier. I also have the HP 50g, but I feel like there’s just too much to deal with so I rarely use it. It seems very crowded in the displays and functions, through I do like being able to see more than two stacks. I wish the scientific calculators would show all of the RPN stacks, then I would never use the 50g because I really don’t care about graphing on calculators.</p>