Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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135 of 137 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Best scientific calculator made today (with caveats), July 22, 2004
There has long been a real need for a high-quality scientific calculator for serious scientific and engineering professional, so I was glad to see HP back in the market with the HP-33S, a replacement for their popular HP-32SII (of which I own three!). With some caveats (see below), I've found this to be a very good scientific calculator, and probably the best one being manufactured today. I guess HP finally noticed that people are willing to pay over $300 for a used HP-32SII, and took the hint.
First, some general comments. I judged the overall quality of the calculator to be quite good. The keys have a good solid feel, like traditional HP calculators. It has about 80 times the memory of the HP-32SII, and I found it to run about 2.5 times faster. The manual is excellent -- clear and very well written, and similar to the HP-32SII manual.
The HP-33S has a few new features that weren't on the HP-32SII:
- Both RPN and algebraic entry modes. (The default is RPN.) I use RPN exclusively myself.
- Several new functions: cube, cube root, integer divide, remainder, greatest integer, and signum.
- A menu with 40 built-in physical constants (speed of light, electron charge, etc.). This is a great feature; I was constantly having to look up physical constants and store them in registers; now the constants are built in.
- A feature to shift the exponent of a number in engineering mode by factors of 1000.
- Four-way cursor keys (as you would find on a PDA or graphing calculator).
- Two-line display (to show both the X and Y registers).
The HP-33S does have a couple of drawbacks:
- Most importantly, as others have noted, the decimal point (and comma) are WAY too small. The decimal point can be difficult to see, especially when it comes after a digit 2.
- The rather bizarre V-shaped keyboard is a bit strange, but not really a problem. It just tends to give the keyboard a bit of a cluttered look. I'd rather see a traditional HP rectangular layout with blue and gold function keys on a dark background.
If you are a science or engineering professional or serious student, I would recommend this calculator as the best one being made today. Hopefully HP will come out with an HP-33SII that corrects the design problems -- then they'll have a five-star calculator.
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70 of 72 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good HP-32SII replacement, but why isn't it better?, September 19, 2004
I have an HP-32SII that's started to behave a little flaky so I bought this as as replacement. Compared to the HP-32SII, this has a couple of improvements that I find useful:
-- The 'eng' key to display the current result in engineering mode is a nice way to avoid always having your calculator in 'eng mode'; sometimes handy.
-- I like the constants library.
There are only a couple of items where I think the result is _worse_ than the HP-32SII:
-- The overly small decimal point. I still find it completely usable but this clearly a faux pau for HP.
-- On the '32, all the menu screens fit onto a single line, even though doing so caused some functions to only be given two characters. On the 33, they chose more characters but sometimes you have to scroll the menu line. Example: For Sums->(sum of x*y). The '32 just lists 'xy' whereas the '33 you have to scroll to '(sigma)xy'. More readable, yes. Better, no... especially since they had two lines but only ever use the first one!
...and then there's a LONG list of items that I think HP could have done that they didn't. The HP-32SII was released something like a decade ago, and it's poor that this new model doesn't reflect a little more work over that decade. Examples:
-- Still only single character variables names. With so much (31K) memory vs. the '32 (some hundreds of bytes), why?
-- Editing equations can still only be done via backspacing, not true left/right cursor key movement. Sheesh.
-- Complex numbers still take up two levels of the stack and therefore require you to use two keystrokes to manipulate them. This one I can sort of understand in that changing it would imply each level of the stack could be a lot more than just 'a decimal number,' but still, I believe the old HP-42 does this, so why not?
-- It would be very nice to be able to display an arbitrary string on the first line and the X level of the stack on the second; this would give you the same utility as '->Tag' on the HP-48 series that I've found quite useful.
-- Only 4 stack levels. Again, with so much memory, why!?
So... I'm satisfied with my purchase, I'm just disappointed in HP. It does seem that the old HP is gone and not coming back. Although I'm sure the folks working on the calculators are hard working and dedicated, I think the culture of HP today is so different than that of the old calculator design group in Corvallis, Oregon, USA that the overall result is mediocre.
I would love to see, e.g., the HP-33SII that incorporates many of the possible improvements listed above!
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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing and not for the presbyopic, August 9, 2005
I read all of the Amazon reviews and concluded that this was the best value in HP scientific calculators using RPN (and wanting a durable keypad unlike the HP 48/49 series). I thought the unreadable decimal point issue (see others) was overblown, and I liked the idea of pre-programmed physical constants. Thus I was quite disappointed when it turned out the display is SO INFERIOR. Not only is the decimal point unreadable, but the pixelated numerals are absolutely unacceptable. My $10 TI calculator has a better display. Moreover, accessing the physical constants requires scrolling through a menu with nearly unreadable symbols, and you have to have the manuals to interpret the symbols unless you happen to remember the value of the physical contstant that you are seeking. I can get the number out of a textbook faster.
I am an engineering professional and have preferred HP calculators for over 20 years. I have used cheap (but functional) TI calculators since I lost my last HP about 8 years ago (I am only now getting over the loss). I resolved to get a new HP with RPN because I am tired of using the algebraic-entry TI in the office and my wife's old HP 12 (RPN) at home. I returned the HP 33S to Amazon and will now but an old-style HP 12 financial calculator (and wait for the Qonos).
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