Survey posted 2005-05-02 22:04 by Jon.

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The casio 9850 gfx was pretty cool; however, it failed to support ASM (as stated above). If TI were to come out with a color screen, I would hope that they would make it more than just the basic hex colors (red, blue, green).

"red, blue, green" might be enough; just look at what we can do with "black and white"

That would be interesting. If each pixel had red, green, and blue, and you could only turn each color off or on, you still have the following colors: white, blue, green, cyan, red, purple, yellow, black. That's eight colors.

Now, if the technique currently used for grayscale worked well with this type of display, and you used 4-color "grayscale," you would end up with four intensities for each color component. That would leave you with 64 colors.

However, more advanced color LCDs react too fast for software-based grayscale to work (it would look like flickering). In any case, hardware-supported grayscale would be best, since it would simplify programming (and TI's OS would use it too, and it would look nice and pretty).

With just black and white.. we've already managed to get up to 8 colors! Thats with 2 colors, 000000 and FFFFFF.. with the RGB variations.. if I am correct, we could make many colors!: 000000(white), 0000FF(blue), 00FFFF(blue-green), 00FF00(green), FF0000(red), FFFF00(violet), FF00FF(brown), and FFFFFF(black).. this would just be the native colors, so with an alternating display of these, many more colors could be achieved!

[P.S... I could be totally wrong here, and I am just going off of my slim knowledge of how colors are displayed :)]

With additive colors (RGB) the sequences are

000000 black
0000FF blue
00FF00 green
00FFFF cyan (blue-green)
FF0000 red
FF00FF magenta (purple-ish)
FFFF00 yellow
FFFFFF white

Yes, but I think his point was that you would be able to, for example, toggle between 0000FF and 00FFFF to make a color midway between cyan and blue, and, if it performs the same as the black-and-white screen, you could get 7 intermediate colors...so that would be a grand total of 9^3 = 729 colors. Although I think 5^3 = 125 colors would be a bit more realistic with only three intermediate forms...but even 3^3 = 27 colors is enough for me...

I was just listing the hex triplets for each colour. I know that intermediate colours could be simulated with two or more planes for each component like with grayscale.

Using 2 planes each, that's 4 possible values per component, and there would be 4^3 = 64 colours.

3 planes => 8 values per component => 8^3 = 512 colours.

Wouldn't it make calculators more expensive, take more battery power, and in general harder to program? (having to put in the color to make stuff)?

yeah, but think about it... a color screen calculator would *probably* come with a rechargeable battery and a manual for its programming... plus... Think Of Faraday Anywhere Color... and all those games...

That's why they should never make calculators universally color-enabled. If there was one model with color that the people who would use color could buy, then that would be best. Personally, I'd rather see the extra battery power go towards increased computing power rather than entertainment features.

Right, it always annoys me to see people asking for high-resolution color displays, huge processors, and stupid things like hard drives for those exact reasons!

do people seriously ask for hard drives? I would think that a HD would only be useful if yru wanted multiple gigabytes whitch seems way overblown for a alculator. seriously how many 64k games could you fit in a gig?

I think the best way to get lots of storage is to give them regular-sized USB ports and write software to recognize USB flashdrives.

or flash card slot

I agree...1GB CF is $70 (but SD/MMC might fit better). With 1GB you could stick a whole movie at calculator resolution on the card & watch it on the color screen (with your headphones plugged into the linkport - the sound would be better if the processor was faster). Then again, my GBA Movie Player will already do that & it costs about $25.

Yeah, at some point I just have to say, "Go buy a cheap laptop and put microsoft excel on it, and/or mathematica." People who argue about wanting it for tests have to realize that if TI made a calculator with a hi-res color display, a 3gb hard drive, etc etc it would NOT be allowed on tests. There really is nothing wrong with the 89's hardware. I suggest TI continue to make calcs with the hardware of the 89 titanium, but rewrite the OS and AMS. If the OS supported grayscale, and the graph functions (especially 3d grapher) were rewritten decently I would definitely rather have that than an expensive calc with a color screen and a 2 gigs of memory and another crappy OS.

Basically, you don't want the calculator to become a Windows PC?

Right!!!

Whateva. I due wut i waunt. u donte knowe mei.

The whole point to a handheld graphing calculator is to provide a cheap, specialized tool for calculations, graphing, and science. It doesn't make sense to add stuff that breaks out of that mold to it, because it defeats the purpose. There are other tools for things like that, and I think a lot of this website's visitors are a little too devoted to their calculators. I mean, come on, its a calculator! Sure it can play games, and games are great for it, but in the end its a calculator, not a gameboy.

I agree with the first two items you listed, but the third shouldn't be a problem. If you've done any work with grayscale, you'd be able to handle RGB. Battery consumption would be the biggest problem, IMO.