48 out of 48 people found this review helpful.
A nice "tool" but...
Date of Review: Sep 12, 2000
Hubby has many hobbies, and he is more than college educated. He is self-taught in many things (reads Russian!) including celestial navigation. He never liked math; but, since many hobbies require math, again, it is self-taught. A simple calculator is useless to him since he needs trig functions and many others. (The "law of tangents" he tells me requires all of the digits in the mantissa to enable him to compute to 1/100 of a second of arc!). So why this product?
The keys are solid, not rubbery. Keys require a very light touch, and they register responses quickly and well. The mantissa (window) can and does tell what he's just recently punched-in -- up to a point. The storage is very adequate, about seven places to store numbers. Conversions in both fraction or decimals is easy and versatile. THE GRAPHICS OF THE NUMBERS -- ESPECIALLY FOR MINUTES AND SECONDS OF ARC --are excellent, as compared to other foreign-make calculators.
This simple calculator looks forbidding, but a duffer (if one merely wants to add or subtract) or an engineer can make excellent use of it.
Hardly any maintenance, but don't leave it in the sun or a very hot place. Battery life is long.
Backfire: other calculators are almost as accurate (believe it or not, when one gets to ten digits do they total-up to 180 degrees for a triangle, or merely 179.999998?). That's one difference which is called accuracy. Oh, numbers are rounded, but some roundings in some makes of calculators fall short! The biggest backfire about this nice machine is its lack of reliability. Hubby has owned about ten or twelve of these Sharps, but they usually "conk" out. Too often. In fact he's vowed (and broken the vow merely to see if he can get one with all of the excellence intact AND WORKING FOR A WHILE)! Yep, that's too many to own and to have failed for a person. He and I'd recommend it, as indicated below, but with serious reservations about its life expectancy. Many are made in China, and that is NOT to say that hubby has not purchased some very excellent Chinese products.
Cost? Depends on the Sharp model, but you can get similars in Sharp's from about $8 to $20.
