Re: Which TI should I buy?

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Re: Which TI should I buy?

While I prefer The F-button menus, I'm commenting on the thing about the
catalog.
1)  I'm pretty sure (though not positive) that a couple of things on the
85 are only in the catalog.
2)  Phillip wasn't saying he liked the catalog, he was saying he liked
the custom menu, and so do I.  I program (in all my spare time :) and I
like having all the things I use a lot that aren't in the program menus
in my custom menu-
i.e. and, or, not, xor, <, >, (and the equal ones),  x-root, !, ', etc.
I'd actually prefer a bigger custom menu!
3)  While neither menu system is necessarily better, the TI-85's is
"cleaner," and lets you see the majority of the screen even if you're 3
layers down.


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On Wed, 11 Dec 1996 23:55:24 -0500 "Johnny \"Big Dog\" Miyares"
<jmiyares@MDIHS.U98.K12.ME.US> writes:
>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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