ti-84 Plus Ce Color Graphing Calculator

Is it the best graphing calculator out there? Not by a long shot! In fact, it's severely underpowered compared to the competition. But it has a few unique qualities. For us old timers, it's a spruced up edition of and old classic, the TI-83 Plus, which became popular because it runs on a Z80 processor (even if most people never took advantage of that). This popularity turned it into a de facto standard for students, teachers, and educational institutions. So if you're a student, this calculator is a safe bet. It will be accepted by teachers, even in most exams, and you'll have plenty of people around you who know it. In fact, some schools require this model. Ironically, the feature that propelled this calculator in the first place -- the ability to program it in Z80 machine language -- has been locked out by TI because it made it possible to cheat during exams. Even more ironically, this lock was soon broken, so they angered their customers for nothing. In place of the Z80, the newer models offer a trimmed down version of Python, as do most other graphing calculators today. While it occupies the low end of graphing calculators, in terms of speed and capabilities, it's still overpowered for just about anyone but those who do fairly advanced mathematics. Unless you're an engineer, physicist, or mathematician (or studying to become one), you won't come close to using all of the abilities of this calculator. But if you are an engineer, physicist, or mathematician, I would recommend an HP Prime G2, a TI-Nspire CX II CAS, or a Casio fx-CG50 PRIZM. All three are hugely faster, have more memory, and have CAS and better support for complex and exact math (on the Casio, the CAS is downloaded separately). If you need power, but are on a budget, the Casio fx-9750GIII is basically a black & white version of the fx-CG50, but at less than half the price of a TI-84 Plus CE. It's slower than the fx-CG50, but a lot faster than the TI-84 Plus CE.