Yes, as people have noticed, I accidentally pressed the cube root function the first time instead of square root -- negative cube roots are valid, so it was working fine.
I thought, for a moment, it must have been an AI or self-learning calculator, LOL. Have you tried the APO to see if it was 8 minutes or so? (If it is I wonder why that time was chosen; if it isn't, perhaps it needs a calculator so it doesn't have to count the 8 minutes before turning off? LOL).
Nice idea. Where can you get an LCD for 1 Dollar. But many of those LCDs usually have a rubber/metal connector that is nasty to work with. But I liked the idea!!!
I once saw one of those fake shake flashlights. There's a coil and a magnet in them. Shaking is supposed to charge it. It was made from clear plastic, so you could see that the coil was not actually connected to anything, so the shaking would not do anything. To light up, they had three CR2032 coin cells in them! Here's the kicker: The flashlight was cheaper than three CR2032 by themselves! And you did get a nice coil (it's a real coil, just not connected), a strong magnet, and a quite nice white LED on top of that!
To be honest, I'm not disappointed one bit by the calculator. A decent set of functionality that seems to work, a manual that's properly written in English and of course the $1 price tag. There have been calculators that have been sold which cost far more than this price and which lacked some of its functionality (e.g. Commodore calculator) or had a manual written in Engrish.
For the price in particular, it's really amazing. In the mid-1980s, my school-issued calculator was about $70 (nearly $180, inflation adjusted to 2021) and it had no more functionality than this device. The only real factor that makes this calculator more expensive than an equivalent 4-function is the yield (and hence price) of the ASSP under that epoxy blob. The housing and keypad are not going to be significantly different in cost, assuming the device remains the same approximate size.
@Andrew_koala contractions aren't "poor language skills" or bastardization, it's always been around in many languages and is acceptable and common. don't know what stuff you smoked before writing that nonsense of a comment
grad stands for gradians. It is a base 10 angle system where there are 100 gradians in a right angle or 400 gradians around a full circle. They have never received much practical use since they have trouble with divisibility by three -- which happens a lot when using triangles for calculations...
@@AgentOffice radians. Same but there's 2*pi radians in a full circle. Rad works well with "hardcore maths" because pi's relationship to circles and stuff.
@@AgentOffice Radians -- which are very commonly used since they relate an angle to its unit circle arc length. An angle in radians is measured by the arc distance in terms of a circle's radius to achieve the angle on a circle. A circle contains π diameters in its circumstance. Each diameter contains two radii. So there are 2π radians in the full 360° of a circle. Half a circle is π radians or 180°. 90° is a quarter of a full circle or π/2 radians and so on.
As a Computer Engineering student, I used this to convert to and from binary and hex constantly for my earlier classes. I told my prof about this specific calculator because he said any calculator that couldn't connect to the internet was allowed on the exam. I had all the answers to conversion questions at the push of a button. Best calculator I could ever want for that class and it was $1.
It will never cease to amaze me that even something that by modern standards is a pretty simple device is capable of being manufactured in China and shipped all the way to the US to be sold for $1. Hell, it's amazing they can even get the manufacturering to be sub-$1, let alone somehow the manufacturer making a profit and presumably the dock workers, boat workers, trucking companies, and dollar tree employees making some amount of profit from this $1 item.
Not necessarily prison or slave labour, but 100% machine labour. Guess there is a machine somewhere in China spitting out thousands of these every day. As it is a small item you can ship a million of them in a standard seafreight container.
I remember when scientific calculators were at least hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars and most people used log tables for calculations. Now we have the $1 calculator. If only I had a time machine and a crate of these things.
I remember when graphing calculators were $100 (2015). Now they are $120 (2021). Texas Instruments is bucking the trend of cheaper electronics over time. :( Lol...
@@thatguyalex2835 Yeah, that's why education in Europe runs on Casio calculators. I have been using one (one and the same, on the same battery, actually) from 6th grade through grad school, and I'm completely lost when someone hands me a TI. 😅
@@gesamtszenario Casio is much better in my opinion. I own a TI-84, cos that is what I am used to, but I would totally use Casio if schools taught us about how to use them. :)
@@gesamtszenario Huh? In Sweden we use Ti calculators in most higher up education, all the books are written for it anyway, and the teachers are lost with other ones.
@@ianbakke What, really? That's news to me. I didn't know of any secondary or tertiary education system in Europe that uses TI over Casios. Guess there is at least one, then. Still using the fx-85WA I got in 6th grade, 23 years ago. That thing took me all the way to a Master's degree. Though I have upgraded to the fx-991 lately. Still a bit miffed they made both an English (. for decimal) and a German (, for decimal) version, instead of making it switchable. Had to get both, because there's no such thing as too many scientific calculators. ❤️
Because it comes usable in a plastic bag it might be a good throwaway calculator for engineers to use in the field since its sealed from the elements and other stuff like dust or oil and it doesn't matter if it breaks as it's only $1
The plastic bag isn't airtight - if you squeeze it, it deflates, it doesn't squish like a bubble, so I'm sure it's not dust or oil tight either (not to mention that the polybag is probably not going to resist solvent/oil attacks).
I actually just bought one of these today, because of this video :) I really liked the idea of a neat little calculator like this that can convert hexadecimal numbers. It should come in VERY handy when I'm programming vintage computers.
It's hard to understand how a company can design and manufacture these, then ship them half way around the world to be sold for $1 while still making a profit.
I actually used this exact calculator in my math classes in High School. Did pretty much everything I needed it to. Grad= gradians, a measure of an angle like degrees. 400 grad/gradians= 360°
IIRC, it came out of the french revolution, and was their attempt to decimalize the angle measurements. While it had some use in civil engineering and with the french military, it has largely fallen out of use.
I bought a Casio sci calculator for Algebra in the 90s. I still have it and it still works, but it was considerably more expensive at the time (~$40 if I remember right, and that's pre-inflation). While I don't have high hopes for the Jott calculator, I would be interested in hearing how well it held up in school and afterwards.
Grads actually have a use when dealing with radians. Just half the grad value then you have an answer in radians in terms of pi / 100. E.g. 400 grad = 2 pi radians 200 grad = 1 pi radians 100 grad = 0.5 pi radians Etc.
It does a good job for $1. The Casio calculator that used during my high school years (circa 2000) doesn't have support for Bin, Hex, or Oct and cost a lot more.
British exam boards certify the use of Casio scientific calculators, which has allowed Casio to ramp up the prices knowing students wont buy the competition.
I have a clone of your Casio calculator that I bought for $2 in China, Joinus JS-82ms. The expression based entry is very verbose compared to these simpler Sharp clone calculators and the lack of hex mode is super disappointing.
10$ Casio scientific calculators now aday does a lot more and it lives for years. I would buy a 10$ casio calculators for important exams, cant trust 1$ china calculator
@@ThanhThanh-it1pm no, at $10 price point you get ancient overpriced garbage. I have made all of my exams on a Hong Kong Tozai calculator and I was perfectly fine. It doesn't matter how much a calculator does for you. They make here all exams easily possible without a calculator as well, as they're supposed to test your insight rather than your typing skill.
@@SianaGearz I see the price is difference for differnce countries. I found Casio fx-300ESPLUS2 12usd look like good one. in my country Fx500 MS/ES is very popular the price aroud 10-15usd . The point is scientific caiso is very durable. Even you dont use many funtions, it suvice like 100 time to drop lol many year. the cheap china one can be broken any time, in the middle exam it's nightmate. I dont agree the simple caculator cant be use high shool/collage math/physis/chemiscal exam. some function is very useful to speed up your exam.
For just 1 dollar, this is really, really good! It would be a dream back in the 70's when basic electronic calculators (not even scientific) were really expensive.
The factorial of 69 (usually ‘n!’ on the keypad) is a good performance test for a scientific calculator. This $1 calculator is probably as good as the Casio fx570 I had in school, better in a way because the Casio didn’t have a backspace. We’ve come a long way…
Yeah my calculator from Casio was so expensive and this on does everything except i think solving q and c equations and also random equations we give it. My Casio still doesn’t have a backspace though now they are getting it i think
Back in 1984 in high school I got a Radio Shack branded Casio fx450, folding keyboard, basically the highest end scientific without programming capability. It rocked.
I have one like that, picked it up in here in Europe for about $2.50 a year or 2 ago. It's an awesome calculator for programmers, because it has HEX and (limited) binary function (the binary is limited to 1 byte). Still, lil awesome gem. Thanks for the mercury warning.
That is an alkaline battery number. Alkaline batteries have not contained mercury since 1996 - unless the Chinese maker is still using it and illegally exporting them.
Interesting that this appears to compute using floating point numbers. That requires a lot of decoding to display the numbers on screen as well as a lot of circuitry behind the scenes. Floating point rules allow the encoding of repeating numbers which then get rounded up during decimal decoding for display. Which is why your trick of 1/9*9 works. Most calculators use fixed point math with BCD circuitry. It's simple, cheap to implement, and requires very little circuitry. In fact, the memory cells, the display digits, and the ALU lines are all balanced out into a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) type of configuration. This is a fascinating amount of computing power for $1. I'm impressed they can pull it off.
Seems pretty good. What's to complain? I would buy it even if it were a little bit more expensive like $5. I especially like the hex/binary conversion feature.
No you wouldn't. Because the Casio FX115ESplus has radically dropped in price and can be had for $15 delivered from Amazon. I've seen it for $12 at Walmart. So for the price of a couple of Starbucks you get a real engineering calculator.
Back in the 80's in high school, we compared the speed of our calculators by entering " 69! " ( factorial of 69 ), the largest number with an answer not exceeding 10⁹⁹.
I still find it amazing that it’s possible to make something like that, ship it halfway around the world, and sell it for $1, with everyone in the chain presumably making a profit
@@BenHeckHacks I would think it's a lot less than that. Dollar Store probably pays 65 cents for it. In addition to the parts, there's assembly, packing, shipping, import duty, and profit for the manufacturer.
I saw these a little while ago, a whole rack of them! Pretty amazing. Reminded me of when I saw the first consumer electronic calculators come out (early '70s). The price point always seemed to be $150 (about equal to $1000 today). Thanks for the internal view.
I had a calculator exactly like this one in middle school a while back. It didn't last long, but it served me well while it did. I had no idea about the random number generator feature (it may have been added recently, though). It's a good option for doing algebra homework on the cheap, and it's worth the extra quarter at Dollar Tree!
This takes me back too late 90s high school here in South Africa. The majority of the class has Sharp scientific calculators and the rich kids had Casio. What I would give to go back in time with one of these and screw with the snobbery.
@@MrDowntemp0 not bad. My son is pretty rough with objects and I havent seen a broken one yet. Water got spilled on one of them and I thought it didnt work for about a day but came back to life, after drying out.
@@MrDowntemp0 I've had same one in my car for probably four years now, still works on the original battery, the only issue is some of the text has started to fade off the numbers.
You pressed shift-square root which the calculator reads as cube-root, then it correctly calculates it. Time to change the title of your video! Great value machine.
4:20 They could be saying "approximately 8 miuntes [sic]" because it's easier than saying something like seven minutes forty-three seconds, it doesn't mean they don't know the exact time. Having said that, I'm sure they _don't_ know the exact time. I don't see a crystal oscillator and I doubt there would be any sort of calibration of its internal oscillator.
The key placement seems heavily influenced by earlier Sharp calculators, such as the Sharp EL-545 I used in high school. Exactly the same positions for the A-F hex keys, base conversion keys, and many other functions.
I was about to say the same thing - seems to be an Elsimate 506 clone - such calculators were around even in the mid 80s when I was in secondary school and were quite cheap even back then. There were 2 versions that came in the same casing (and an older and newer model, with rounded and square buttons respectively) - the two models were one exactly like this $1 one (but in a much nicer pressed aluminium case) and the other had 40 step programmable mode, with a button LRN / COMP that could execute any sequence of 40 button presses and even stop to take input. Those were the days!
When I was at school I had a Casio Fraction calculator with almost exactly the same function set as this. Though with keys in slightly different locations, a metal body, and a flippy cover as well.
Geez, I remember when the most basic 4-function pocket calculator cost about $70. It ran on 4 AA batteries (which would last about 6 hours, or you could use the wall adapter), had an 8-digit LED display, and no memory feature at all. It didn't even directly do percentages. 1974, and $70 then was equal to about $300 today. The only reason I had it is because it was a prize in a contest. $1 for a scientific calculator today. Nobody in 1973-1974 would ever have believed it.
for 1$ you seen to get alot of value, i remember being forced to buy a expansiv calculator for school, also dont forgot that the battery is aready included
For $1, it's amazing. Consider that the retailer gets a big chunk of that money, then you have all the shipping steps from the factory in China to the store where you bought it, plus customs and whatnot. The actual manufacturing cost must be pennies. Incredible.
Geez, my first calculator was $ 180 that is approximately double in todays money and could just do + - x ÷. But who needs a calculator anyway today, we all have smartphones.
At 20 seconds (then at end. ok you got 1). Not 1 cell but 2 in mine. I got one years ago from the UK Poundland. The 2nd functions are in red, Your one all white lettering. Just got out to look at and found not going. Got lots of button cells on store, changed over to slightly less height ones, diameter the same. Now going again. for $1 - a pound, daft. how electronics gets cheaper and less. Still got 30 year old calculator, needed at 17 for college. Casio fx-3400p. Bet that was £30 or so, will do more but was always too good for me. $1 (pound) gets something with more functions than most people would use!. I got one over here in uk. I was doing the same as you. Got the same numbers.
Grads are actually gradians and they were used by French and land surveyors for some time in the past, but didn't stick. 1 grad is equal to pi/200 radians or 0.9 degrees. A circle is 400 gradians. The more you know
I remember finding this at the dollar store a few years ago. Got me through my Linear algebra, multivariate calculus, and differential equations classes. little thing was an absolute beast.
I don't know where it is used, but gradians are a way of measuring a circle in percentage instead of degrees. In other words, 360 degrees equals 100 gradians.
I'd hazard a guess that the approximate automatic power off time is the result of an imprecise timing loop being used. I'm not sure I'd recommend the "I have math homework, so I'm going to Dollar Tree" excuse, though I'd love to see someone try!
I bought one of these to take my HAM radio test a couple years back. It worked great and thankfully I didn't need any negative cube roots for that test.
I think they do still do them, because I live in the UK and my one was exactly like this, just with the case So I bet $1 for just the calculator, and $5ish for it with the case
In the UK, I bought a similar calculator from Poundland in Manchester for £1 probably over ten years ago. The text on the front is identical. The instruction leaflet is similar, except it has a heading with the words 'Scientific Calculator' and 'Operations Manual' above the body text. The text, fonts, layout, and decorative bars for the subheadings is identical. As noted by others, this calculator came with a plastic cover for the front, and a web of rubbery plastic over the back. The UK version has nothing embossed on the back; the rectangular space is blank. It also has two LR44 cells inside, wired in parallel, and includes the contact clip for the second cell. It was sold in a cardboard-backed blister pack. P.S: There is no noticeable delay on my £1 calculator when doing any of the more complex calculations such as ∛π, so maybe the second battery allows the microprocessor to run at a higher clock frequency.
This calculator might be yet another knock-off of the CASIO fx-82MS but in a smaller, cheaper form factor (many cheap knock offs of that particular model exist)
The thing is, original CASIO FRACTION fx-82 calculators lacked Binary, Hexadecimal and Octal conversion, but had Fraction keys, which this calculator lacks.
This is functionally a clone of Sharp EL-506p from the 80s. These have been the mainstay of cheap scientific calculators for 3 decades now. I had an absolutely gorgeous one made by Tozai, Hong Kong.
My 8th grade math class had a ton of these dollar tree scientific calculators. They were actually super powerful. During those middle school years I myself owned a Casio FX-300ES Plus for a time, and a TI-34 Multiview for a time as well, both of which seemed a little more capable.
I see a CPLX notation above the right-pointing arrow key. So the negative root thing is legit - that calculator appears to support complex numbers. There must be a way to switch between the real and imaginary parts on the display. Check the manual :) (I bought one of these a while ago too, but the battery is long dead).
Cheaper to buy a new calculator than a replacement battery! I have one of those, I forget if the complex numbers are for imaginary numbers, or x/y polar versus angular conversions.
the cplx feature just reassigns two keys, a and b, allowing complex input. you can do complex arithmetic (+, -, *, ÷) by inputting the real part and pressing a, then the imaginary part and pressing b, and you toggle which part of the result is displayed using the same two keys. without cplx, those two keys are for polar-rectangular (and vice versa) conversions. cplx is just for arithmetic, it can't do real (no pun) complex maths. the reason it works in the video is he's actually doing the 3rd root, which is allowed in real numbers.
@@bobblum5973 True, but throwing away a perfectly good calculator just because it needs a new battery just seems stupidly wasteful to me. I just bought one of these cool little calculators today and when the battery dies I'll probably go ahead and replace it.
This calculator used to come with a cover that snapped onto the front, but even without the cover it's an incredible value. It can also spit out random numbers, and you can string the digits together to get longer numbers. The reason that some calculators show inaccuracy in the later decimal digits is because all calculators convert to logarithms to simplify the calculations. Multiplication becomes addition, and so on. It all depends on how many digits of irrational logarithms are programmed into the calculator.
I may just get one now for the hex conversion alone! Also, really neat to see a random number generator. Wonder how they implemented that in the mystery blob ic
0:46 This reminds me of how I passed by some small market stall where they had a Canon basic calculator that they used while it was still in the packaging and had the price sticker from when they bought it at a Popular.
Gradian (Grad) has a fun history. French. Instead of 90 degrees, there's 100, because everything in France went metric. They pushed it, the world didn't listen. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian
I went from a TI-something graphing calculator to something like this and used it through my junior and senior years of high school. I couldn't keep graphing calculators. People loved stealing them. They didn't steal the plain ole scientific calculator and I did just as well in honors trig and honors calculus than with graphing calculators.
Professor I had in college was talking about back in the 80s he was buying a car and the dealership was offering a free calculator with purchase of a new car, touting it would be the LAST calculator he'd ever need and own. I think he's still upset to this day about the false advertisement.
Amazon UK have that exact calculator for a shocking £4.95! (But it does come in a real cardboard blister pack.) Alternatively, you can get one branded as a "Texet fx500r" for £3.95 and enjoy the anticipation of wondering which of the three lucky-dip colours you'll get!
I actually bought one of these in the UK (under the Tallon brand) and both the calculator and the manual were the exact same but with a different brand. I only used mine for about 2 seconds and moved to a Casio last month 😅
Thanks. I love these things! I have 2 of them. I don't even care that I can download calculator apps for my phone (I have several of those, too). I'm just old-school enough to appreciate real calculators... and value! tavi.
I have the same design of calculator which I bought from poundland in the UK for one Pound. Mine is ever so slightly different though. It has orange rubber sticky-out bits, and it came with a lid which can either cover the buttons or be clipped on the back. The thing lives in my garage, and has taken huge amounts of abuse, but it just keeps on working. It has outlived two casio models costing an order of magnitude more money.
My whole question is it 1 dollar because its crap? Or 1 dollar because we're living in the future and its just gotten easier to make good computers- glad to see its the latter
I have an ancient mechanical Friden calculator that does multiple/divide and a method of doing square roots. (there is a model that directly does square roots). Does that count?
Yes, as people have noticed, I accidentally pressed the cube root function the first time instead of square root -- negative cube roots are valid, so it was working fine.
Surprised you hit the cube root button, I always took you for a square 😅
I thought, for a moment, it must have been an AI or self-learning calculator, LOL. Have you tried the APO to see if it was 8 minutes or so? (If it is I wonder why that time was chosen; if it isn't, perhaps it needs a calculator so it doesn't have to count the 8 minutes before turning off? LOL).
Thought it got an over the air upgrade 😂
why didn't you just add an annotation? that way more people would see the correction!
@@lolman123401 UA-cam does not support annotations anymore.
Amazing how far we've come, that such a fully functioning calculator can be available to everyone.
Hello Big Car! Nice seeing you here! :-)
Look who it is
Big Car, Little Calculator.
@@vwestlife 😀
I remember needing one for school and the very cheapest I could find was like £20.
My dad used to buy cheap calculators just to use the LCD displays in his electronics projects, the same display from RS cost 10x more.
Your Dad is a smart Guy 👍
I also buy stuff from Dollar (and a Quarter now) Tree to use as a donor for hardware projects from time to time.
What kind of projects did he use them for?
Nice idea. Where can you get an LCD for 1 Dollar. But many of those LCDs usually have a rubber/metal connector that is nasty to work with. But I liked the idea!!!
I once saw one of those fake shake flashlights. There's a coil and a magnet in them. Shaking is supposed to charge it. It was made from clear plastic, so you could see that the coil was not actually connected to anything, so the shaking would not do anything. To light up, they had three CR2032 coin cells in them! Here's the kicker: The flashlight was cheaper than three CR2032 by themselves! And you did get a nice coil (it's a real coil, just not connected), a strong magnet, and a quite nice white LED on top of that!
To be honest, I'm not disappointed one bit by the calculator. A decent set of functionality that seems to work, a manual that's properly written in English and of course the $1 price tag. There have been calculators that have been sold which cost far more than this price and which lacked some of its functionality (e.g. Commodore calculator) or had a manual written in Engrish.
For the price in particular, it's really amazing. In the mid-1980s, my school-issued calculator was about $70 (nearly $180, inflation adjusted to 2021) and it had no more functionality than this device.
The only real factor that makes this calculator more expensive than an equivalent 4-function is the yield (and hence price) of the ASSP under that epoxy blob. The housing and keypad are not going to be significantly different in cost, assuming the device remains the same approximate size.
They spelled ‘minutes’ wrong, but I’ve seen worse manuals.
@@aedwards123 I think you mean manuels! 😅
@Andrew_koala contractions aren't "poor language skills" or bastardization, it's always been around in many languages and is acceptable and common. don't know what stuff you smoked before writing that nonsense of a comment
@Andrew_koala It will be 100% Hebrew eventually....
grad stands for gradians. It is a base 10 angle system where there are 100 gradians in a right angle or 400 gradians around a full circle. They have never received much practical use since they have trouble with divisibility by three -- which happens a lot when using triangles for calculations...
What's rad
@@AgentOffice radians. Same but there's 2*pi radians in a full circle. Rad works well with "hardcore maths" because pi's relationship to circles and stuff.
@@AgentOffice Radians -- which are very commonly used since they relate an angle to its unit circle arc length.
An angle in radians is measured by the arc distance in terms of a circle's radius to achieve the angle on a circle. A circle contains π diameters in its circumstance. Each diameter contains two radii. So there are 2π radians in the full 360° of a circle. Half a circle is π radians or 180°. 90° is a quarter of a full circle or π/2 radians and so on.
1 rad (radian) happens to be the angle when, in a circle, the arc distance is equal to the radius distance. Pi radians is half a circle angle
yeah that grad angle unit.... never took off :)
As a Computer Engineering student, I used this to convert to and from binary and hex constantly for my earlier classes. I told my prof about this specific calculator because he said any calculator that couldn't connect to the internet was allowed on the exam. I had all the answers to conversion questions at the push of a button. Best calculator I could ever want for that class and it was $1.
It will never cease to amaze me that even something that by modern standards is a pretty simple device is capable of being manufactured in China and shipped all the way to the US to be sold for $1. Hell, it's amazing they can even get the manufacturering to be sub-$1, let alone somehow the manufacturer making a profit and presumably the dock workers, boat workers, trucking companies, and dollar tree employees making some amount of profit from this $1 item.
prison labor, prison labor🙁
prison labor, prison labor🙁
Slave labour and anti-american trade subsidies.
Not necessarily prison or slave labour, but 100% machine labour. Guess there is a machine somewhere in China spitting out thousands of these every day. As it is a small item you can ship a million of them in a standard seafreight container.
Cause cleaning up the environment is a bill that tax payers pay rather than big corpo :(
I love the idea of driving to a dollar tree to use a $1.00 calculator.
is it because it costs $3 in fuel, $5 of wear and tear on the vehicle, and 0.5h of your time?
@@rh4009 a friendly “whooosh!” to you my friend.
@@MrKornnugget Oh? Is there something more subtle that I overlooked? Please do explain.
@@MrKornnugget
He left a comment demonstrating he knew exactly what the joke was, and you replied with the most cringe thing possible
Lol I bet they will all have their batteries drained now after everyone has seen this video!
I remember when scientific calculators were at least hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars and most people used log tables for calculations. Now we have the $1 calculator. If only I had a time machine and a crate of these things.
I remember when graphing calculators were $100 (2015). Now they are $120 (2021). Texas Instruments is bucking the trend of cheaper electronics over time. :( Lol...
@@thatguyalex2835 Yeah, that's why education in Europe runs on Casio calculators. I have been using one (one and the same, on the same battery, actually) from 6th grade through grad school, and I'm completely lost when someone hands me a TI. 😅
@@gesamtszenario Casio is much better in my opinion. I own a TI-84, cos that is what I am used to, but I would totally use Casio if schools taught us about how to use them. :)
@@gesamtszenario Huh? In Sweden we use Ti calculators in most higher up education, all the books are written for it anyway, and the teachers are lost with other ones.
@@ianbakke What, really? That's news to me. I didn't know of any secondary or tertiary education system in Europe that uses TI over Casios. Guess there is at least one, then.
Still using the fx-85WA I got in 6th grade, 23 years ago. That thing took me all the way to a Master's degree. Though I have upgraded to the fx-991 lately. Still a bit miffed they made both an English (. for decimal) and a German (, for decimal) version, instead of making it switchable. Had to get both, because there's no such thing as too many scientific calculators. ❤️
"'Do not carry it in your hip pocket.' So this is not for hipsters."
Absolutely fantastic line.
“‘…and avoid hard knocks.’ So this is not a calculator for a hard knock life” too
Great, now i have something to scare hipsters when they come to annoy me with cult shit!
It's actually a clone of the famous Sharp EL-506P. All modern cheap single-line (not VPAM) scientific calculators use the same platform.
When it was released?
1984. The firmware uses 12 digits internally, displaying 10.
@@namesurname4666 1984
Кстати да, но el-506p был более квадратный
That was a ground breaking calculator back in the day.
Because it comes usable in a plastic bag it might be a good throwaway calculator for engineers to use in the field since its sealed from the elements and other stuff like dust or oil and it doesn't matter if it breaks as it's only $1
Chimo
The plastic bag isn't airtight - if you squeeze it, it deflates, it doesn't squish like a bubble, so I'm sure it's not dust or oil tight either (not to mention that the polybag is probably not going to resist solvent/oil attacks).
@@LewinEdwards Take it out of the bag and put it in a new high quality sealed plastic bag and make it air tight with gaffer tape.
@@StevenSiew2 Now you've spent multiples of the calculator's cost to protect it. I still like the idea though.
if you a real engineers would you really trust a $1 calculator?, wont look good when a huge project collapse and you try to blame on a $1 calculator
Pretty neat calculator for a dollar.
Btw, 6:03 you've done not square root but cubic root of -7, which could be done in real numbers
had he pressed ∛-8 this would have been noticed.
"Does it bend that much?"
**Proceeds to almost snap it in half**
"Not really."
also I swear there is at least a little crack sound when he does it as well xD
I've seen iphones doing it worse
@@andres-vb7js this comment screams bait
@@gokudoge7588 he right tho
@@Asterkool2 “I’ve seen androids explode” is bait for android, albeit exploding is very different from bending
Maybe I'm weird but I'm really impressed. This is a great product for a dollar.
Yeah, I agree, pretty amazing!
I'm also impressed.
I believe you'd be weird if you were NOT impressed.
I actually just bought one of these today, because of this video :)
I really liked the idea of a neat little calculator like this that can convert hexadecimal numbers. It should come in VERY handy when I'm programming vintage computers.
It's hard to understand how a company can design and manufacture these, then ship them half way around the world to be sold for $1 while still making a profit.
@@fredo51 haha yeah .... Oh, you're serious arnt you?
@@fredo51 *buys 200000 calculators*
Shipping is dirt cheap. And they probably make millions of them
It could be a loss leader.
Slave labor in China.
I actually used this exact calculator in my math classes in High School. Did pretty much everything I needed it to. Grad= gradians, a measure of an angle like degrees. 400 grad/gradians= 360°
IIRC, it came out of the french revolution, and was their attempt to decimalize the angle measurements. While it had some use in civil engineering and with the french military, it has largely fallen out of use.
I bought a Casio sci calculator for Algebra in the 90s. I still have it and it still works, but it was considerably more expensive at the time (~$40 if I remember right, and that's pre-inflation). While I don't have high hopes for the Jott calculator, I would be interested in hearing how well it held up in school and afterwards.
Grads actually have a use when dealing with radians. Just half the grad value then you have an answer in radians in terms of pi / 100.
E.g. 400 grad = 2 pi radians
200 grad = 1 pi radians
100 grad = 0.5 pi radians
Etc.
Glad the tech has caught up, graphic calculators should be $5 at this point.
Man damn those kids camping out at dollar tree using the scientific calculators through the packaging!
It does a good job for $1. The Casio calculator that used during my high school years (circa 2000) doesn't have support for Bin, Hex, or Oct and cost a lot more.
British exam boards certify the use of Casio scientific calculators, which has allowed Casio to ramp up the prices knowing students wont buy the competition.
I have a clone of your Casio calculator that I bought for $2 in China, Joinus JS-82ms. The expression based entry is very verbose compared to these simpler Sharp clone calculators and the lack of hex mode is super disappointing.
10$ Casio scientific calculators now aday does a lot more and it lives for years. I would buy a 10$ casio calculators for important exams, cant trust 1$ china calculator
@@ThanhThanh-it1pm no, at $10 price point you get ancient overpriced garbage. I have made all of my exams on a Hong Kong Tozai calculator and I was perfectly fine. It doesn't matter how much a calculator does for you. They make here all exams easily possible without a calculator as well, as they're supposed to test your insight rather than your typing skill.
@@SianaGearz I see the price is difference for differnce countries. I found Casio fx-300ESPLUS2 12usd look like good one. in my country Fx500 MS/ES is very popular the price aroud 10-15usd . The point is scientific caiso is very durable. Even you dont use many funtions, it suvice like 100 time to drop lol many year. the cheap china one can be broken any time, in the middle exam it's nightmate.
I dont agree the simple caculator cant be use high shool/collage math/physis/chemiscal exam. some function is very useful to speed up your exam.
it was not a square root, but a cubic root
For just 1 dollar, this is really, really good! It would be a dream back in the 70's when basic electronic calculators (not even scientific) were really expensive.
I'll buy that for a dollar
The factorial of 69 (usually ‘n!’ on the keypad) is a good performance test for a scientific calculator.
This $1 calculator is probably as good as the Casio fx570 I had in school, better in a way because the Casio didn’t have a backspace. We’ve come a long way…
Yeah my calculator from Casio was so expensive and this on does everything except i think solving q and c equations and also random equations we give it. My Casio still doesn’t have a backspace though now they are getting it i think
Back in 1984 in high school I got a Radio Shack branded Casio fx450, folding keyboard, basically the highest end scientific without programming capability. It rocked.
it does, there's a "DEL" button
Yeah I agree with the factorial thing, but the backspace key might be labelled "DEL" instead
I have one like that, picked it up in here in Europe for about $2.50 a year or 2 ago. It's an awesome calculator for programmers, because it has HEX and (limited) binary function (the binary is limited to 1 byte). Still, lil awesome gem. Thanks for the mercury warning.
That is an alkaline battery number. Alkaline batteries have not contained mercury since 1996 - unless the Chinese maker is still using it and illegally exporting them.
Interesting that this appears to compute using floating point numbers. That requires a lot of decoding to display the numbers on screen as well as a lot of circuitry behind the scenes. Floating point rules allow the encoding of repeating numbers which then get rounded up during decimal decoding for display. Which is why your trick of 1/9*9 works.
Most calculators use fixed point math with BCD circuitry. It's simple, cheap to implement, and requires very little circuitry. In fact, the memory cells, the display digits, and the ALU lines are all balanced out into a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) type of configuration.
This is a fascinating amount of computing power for $1. I'm impressed they can pull it off.
Seems pretty good. What's to complain? I would buy it even if it were a little bit more expensive like $5. I especially like the hex/binary conversion feature.
I just bought one of these little calculators EXACTLY for that reason.
No you wouldn't. Because the Casio FX115ESplus has radically dropped in price and can be had for $15 delivered from Amazon. I've seen it for $12 at Walmart. So for the price of a couple of Starbucks you get a real engineering calculator.
It’s always refreshing when someone uses the term “precision” correctly when speaking about decimal numbers
How would you use it incorrectly?
Precision refers to how how detailed. Eg 99% vs 99.99% or 99.9999%.
Accuracy refers to how correct something is. Eg you said 99% but it was really 87%
@@beau-urns Didn't know people mess that up
Most. I teach university including geo-stats. It’s very very common
It costs less than the batteries for any of my TI calcs I used back in the 80s.
or a TI calc now for that matter, at least a graphing one anyways
@@pizzaivlife Yeah. So true. Even one in the 2010s/2020s
Next week - VWestlife reviews a rare mechanical scientific calculator
Too bad there isn't a $1 RPN calculator floating around, those things are pricey but there's no going back to infix once you've seen the light.
David: bought an HP41 in 1979 still using it.
Back in the 80's in high school, we compared the speed of our calculators by entering " 69! " ( factorial of 69 ), the largest number with an answer not exceeding 10⁹⁹.
Nice.
bet
I still find it amazing that it’s possible to make something like that, ship it halfway around the world, and sell it for $1, with everyone in the chain presumably making a profit
Indeed. Means the parts cost is a mere 33 cents.
@@BenHeckHacks I would think it's a lot less than that. Dollar Store probably pays 65 cents for it. In addition to the parts, there's assembly, packing, shipping, import duty, and profit for the manufacturer.
I saw these a little while ago, a whole rack of them! Pretty amazing. Reminded me of when I saw the first consumer electronic calculators come out (early '70s). The price point always seemed to be $150 (about equal to $1000 today). Thanks for the internal view.
This product couldn't be imported into the EU (RoHS/mercury), so maybe that's a contributing factor to the cheap price.
I had a calculator exactly like this one in middle school a while back. It didn't last long, but it served me well while it did.
I had no idea about the random number generator feature (it may have been added recently, though). It's a good option for doing algebra homework on the cheap, and it's worth the extra quarter at Dollar Tree!
It's not added recently. Functionally it's a clone of Sharp EL-506p and they all have it, all of them that I had over 25 years.
This takes me back too late 90s high school here in South Africa. The majority of the class has Sharp scientific calculators and the rich kids had Casio. What I would give to go back in time with one of these and screw with the snobbery.
Don't you think Sharp are plain better?
My kids love buying those calculators from the dollar store. There are a handful of them floating around our house lol.
My family has a handful of them in the house, car, and the camper. They do come in handy more often than I would have thought.
How well do they hold up?
@@MrDowntemp0 not bad. My son is pretty rough with objects and I havent seen a broken one yet. Water got spilled on one of them and I thought it didnt work for about a day but came back to life, after drying out.
@@mikeall7012 Thanks for the reply! For a buck that's impressive. I'm going to try and talk Santa into leaving one in my stocking.
@@MrDowntemp0 I've had same one in my car for probably four years now, still works on the original battery, the only issue is some of the text has started to fade off the numbers.
Silkscreen Texas Instruments on it and force school kids to buy it as a class approved calculator for $25.
Using the calculator in the bag also provides some protection against dust and moisture and other hazards.
You pressed shift-square root which the calculator reads as cube-root, then it correctly calculates it. Time to change the title of your video! Great value machine.
"if you compare it to a standard 4 function calculator"
*pulls out a vintage pocket calculator from the 70s*
"it's about the same size"
I think I'd be tempted to buy one and leave it in the bag and use it as a "shop" calculator. The bag would be it's protective sleeve.
4:20 They could be saying "approximately 8 miuntes [sic]" because it's easier than saying something like seven minutes forty-three seconds, it doesn't mean they don't know the exact time. Having said that, I'm sure they _don't_ know the exact time. I don't see a crystal oscillator and I doubt there would be any sort of calibration of its internal oscillator.
8 minutes 32 seconds (512 seconds or 2^9)
The key placement seems heavily influenced by earlier Sharp calculators, such as the Sharp EL-545 I used in high school. Exactly the same positions for the A-F hex keys, base conversion keys, and many other functions.
I was about to say the same thing - seems to be an Elsimate 506 clone - such calculators were around even in the mid 80s when I was in secondary school and were quite cheap even back then. There were 2 versions that came in the same casing (and an older and newer model, with rounded and square buttons respectively) - the two models were one exactly like this $1 one (but in a much nicer pressed aluminium case) and the other had 40 step programmable mode, with a button LRN / COMP that could execute any sequence of 40 button presses and even stop to take input. Those were the days!
@@croolis They are clones. This one is sort of a “cousin” of the very first 506 clones.
I really enjoy your content!
When I was at school I had a Casio Fraction calculator with almost exactly the same function set as this. Though with keys in slightly different locations, a metal body, and a flippy cover as well.
Geez, I remember when the most basic 4-function pocket calculator cost about $70. It ran on 4 AA batteries (which would last about 6 hours, or you could use the wall adapter), had an 8-digit LED display, and no memory feature at all. It didn't even directly do percentages. 1974, and $70 then was equal to about $300 today. The only reason I had it is because it was a prize in a contest. $1 for a scientific calculator today. Nobody in 1973-1974 would ever have believed it.
for 1$ you seen to get alot of value, i remember being forced to buy a expansiv calculator for school, also dont forgot that the battery is aready included
For $1, it's amazing. Consider that the retailer gets a big chunk of that money, then you have all the shipping steps from the factory in China to the store where you bought it, plus customs and whatnot. The actual manufacturing cost must be pennies. Incredible.
*"This calculator is automatically turned off approximately 8 **_miuntes_** after the last key operation to save the batteries."*
Geez, my first calculator was $ 180 that is approximately double in todays money and could just do + - x ÷. But who needs a calculator anyway today, we all have smartphones.
Smartphones aren't always correct, depending where you live
@CantEscape1.4MDid you ever get wrong results from your smartphone calculator app?
That's a hell of a bargain. I bought a calculator with all those functions 3 years ago, It cost £10.
8 minutes is 480,000 miliseconds. I assume whoever programmed it just threw 500,000 miliseconds in and they just approximated it in the manual later.
they could have also did 512 seconds or 524288 milliseconds, because they are both powers of 2 and about 8.5 minutes
they probably thought "yeah, 8.5 is about 8"
this got me through fourth grade, not a bad calculator. switched to TI from fifth grade to present day, sophomore in college.
At 20 seconds (then at end. ok you got 1). Not 1 cell but 2 in mine. I got one years ago from the UK Poundland. The 2nd functions are in red, Your one all white lettering. Just got out to look at and found not going. Got lots of button cells on store, changed over to slightly less height ones, diameter the same. Now going again. for $1 - a pound, daft. how electronics gets cheaper and less. Still got 30 year old calculator, needed at 17 for college. Casio fx-3400p. Bet that was £30 or so, will do more but was always too good for me. $1 (pound) gets something with more functions than most people would use!. I got one over here in uk. I was doing the same as you. Got the same numbers.
Yo you got a shout-out in the newest technology connections, great job man.
Grads are actually gradians and they were used by French and land surveyors for some time in the past, but didn't stick. 1 grad is equal to pi/200 radians or 0.9 degrees. A circle is 400 gradians. The more you know
I remember finding this at the dollar store a few years ago. Got me through my Linear algebra, multivariate calculus, and differential equations classes. little thing was an absolute beast.
I don't know where it is used, but gradians are a way of measuring a circle in percentage instead of degrees. In other words, 360 degrees equals 100 gradians.
*400
no, 360 degrees equals 400 gradians not 100
I think you meant 400
I'd hazard a guess that the approximate automatic power off time is the result of an imprecise timing loop being used.
I'm not sure I'd recommend the "I have math homework, so I'm going to Dollar Tree" excuse, though I'd love to see someone try!
I'd guess it's just got an RC oscillator circuit for all the clock pulses and general timing; those things are pretty imprecise a lot of the time
I love your sense of humor. You had me rolling! 🤣😂🤣
I bought one of these to take my HAM radio test a couple years back. It worked great and thankfully I didn't need any negative cube roots for that test.
You should contact your local retailer or nearby dealer for service of your $1 calculator that came in a plastic bag just to see what they say
yeah that would be a fun video to watch
Wow, I had that exact same calculator, I probably bought it about 7 or 8 years ago, it’s cool to know they still make the same model!
These have actually been around for a while. I bought one of these from the dollar store about 7 years ago and it still works great
These used to come with a plastic protective cover.
I think they do still do them, because I live in the UK and my one was exactly like this, just with the case
So I bet $1 for just the calculator, and $5ish for it with the case
Oh I loved the Pentium joke, even though it dates us quite a bit ;)
7:24 the first time, you used 2nd F, so that time you did a cube root - the second time you did a square root.
I just wanted to write the same thing, so the title is wrong :D
"You cant use it below freezing or above 104 degrees"
**British weather has entered the chat**
Nothing beats a second, third, forth or fifth hand TI83 or 84 in my opinion. Having imaginary numbers, i, would be quite impressive for $1 calculator.
In the UK, I bought a similar calculator from Poundland in Manchester for £1 probably over ten years ago. The text on the front is identical. The instruction leaflet is similar, except it has a heading with the words 'Scientific Calculator' and 'Operations Manual' above the body text. The text, fonts, layout, and decorative bars for the subheadings is identical. As noted by others, this calculator came with a plastic cover for the front, and a web of rubbery plastic over the back. The UK version has nothing embossed on the back; the rectangular space is blank. It also has two LR44 cells inside, wired in parallel, and includes the contact clip for the second cell. It was sold in a cardboard-backed blister pack.
P.S: There is no noticeable delay on my £1 calculator when doing any of the more complex calculations such as ∛π, so maybe the second battery allows the microprocessor to run at a higher clock frequency.
This calculator might be yet another knock-off of the CASIO fx-82MS but in a smaller, cheaper form factor (many cheap knock offs of that particular model exist)
The thing is, original CASIO FRACTION fx-82 calculators lacked Binary, Hexadecimal and Octal conversion, but had Fraction keys, which this calculator lacks.
This is functionally a clone of Sharp EL-506p from the 80s. These have been the mainstay of cheap scientific calculators for 3 decades now. I had an absolutely gorgeous one made by Tozai, Hong Kong.
The 82MS has a VPAM display (1 digital screen line + 1 7-segment display line).
My 8th grade math class had a ton of these dollar tree scientific calculators. They were actually super powerful. During those middle school years I myself owned a Casio FX-300ES Plus for a time, and a TI-34 Multiview for a time as well, both of which seemed a little more capable.
I would buy it for the bin/hex/dec feature
That's why I bought it! :D
Isn't that wierd that this got into my recommended?
I see a CPLX notation above the right-pointing arrow key. So the negative root thing is legit - that calculator appears to support complex numbers. There must be a way to switch between the real and imaginary parts on the display. Check the manual :) (I bought one of these a while ago too, but the battery is long dead).
Cheaper to buy a new calculator than a replacement battery!
I have one of those, I forget if the complex numbers are for imaginary numbers, or x/y polar versus angular conversions.
the cplx feature just reassigns two keys, a and b, allowing complex input. you can do complex arithmetic (+, -, *, ÷) by inputting the real part and pressing a, then the imaginary part and pressing b, and you toggle which part of the result is displayed using the same two keys. without cplx, those two keys are for polar-rectangular (and vice versa) conversions. cplx is just for arithmetic, it can't do real (no pun) complex maths. the reason it works in the video is he's actually doing the 3rd root, which is allowed in real numbers.
@@au7weeng534 Thanks for the information. I guess I need to look for my calculator like that to compare functionality. 🙂
@@bobblum5973 True, but throwing away a perfectly good calculator just because it needs a new battery just seems stupidly wasteful to me. I just bought one of these cool little calculators today and when the battery dies I'll probably go ahead and replace it.
This calculator used to come with a cover that snapped onto the front, but even without the cover it's an incredible value. It can also spit out random numbers, and you can string the digits together to get longer numbers. The reason that some calculators show inaccuracy in the later decimal digits is because all calculators convert to logarithms to simplify the calculations. Multiplication becomes addition, and so on. It all depends on how many digits of irrational logarithms are programmed into the calculator.
I may just get one now for the hex conversion alone! Also, really neat to see a random number generator. Wonder how they implemented that in the mystery blob ic
Thanks for another entertaining and enlightening video. Clear and accurate as always! Keep 'em coming!
The first time through you did a cube root of a negative number
I have code that also allows negative square roots. It's used in signal handling.
Bruh the square root of a negative number is just an imaginary number
@CantEscape1.4M I know that, but when working with DSP signals it can be handy to not care about math standards and code things to work.
Basically a clone of a descendant of a Sharp EL-506P clone.
"I'd buy that for a dollar"
0:46 This reminds me of how I passed by some small market stall where they had a Canon basic calculator that they used while it was still in the packaging and had the price sticker from when they bought it at a Popular.
Gradian (Grad) has a fun history. French. Instead of 90 degrees, there's 100, because everything in France went metric. They pushed it, the world didn't listen. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian
hi
showing up at the dollar store to use their calculator is the key to warren buffets financial success
You was pressing 2nd function when first doing negative roots, and that function is cubed root. You can have negative cube roots.
Yeah, I goofed the goof. But Numberphile had a similar mistake in his hilarious Gaxio calculator video.
Good to know if you have an emergency and need to do negative cube roots, you can run into the nearest dollar store.
I went from a TI-something graphing calculator to something like this and used it through my junior and senior years of high school. I couldn't keep graphing calculators. People loved stealing them. They didn't steal the plain ole scientific calculator and I did just as well in honors trig and honors calculus than with graphing calculators.
Professor I had in college was talking about back in the 80s he was buying a car and the dealership was offering a free calculator with purchase of a new car, touting it would be the LAST calculator he'd ever need and own. I think he's still upset to this day about the false advertisement.
Amazon UK have that exact calculator for a shocking £4.95! (But it does come in a real cardboard blister pack.)
Alternatively, you can get one branded as a "Texet fx500r" for £3.95 and enjoy the anticipation of wondering which of the three lucky-dip colours you'll get!
Lol my school just got a set of "texet fx1500 solar" for math lessons
Man, those Texets suck
Gradians are 1/400 of a revolution.
I’m a building engineer and we used it in topography in engineering school
Pretty impressive for $1!
Now I know where to go buy my scientific calculator for Uni in Jan 2022...thanks for the heads up on this little Dollar Tree gem!
I guess you can consider those really early relay computers as "mechanical scientific calculators"
also not recommended to carry in hip pocket 4:12
I actually bought one of these in the UK (under the Tallon brand) and both the calculator and the manual were the exact same but with a different brand. I only used mine for about 2 seconds and moved to a Casio last month 😅
Thanks. I love these things! I have 2 of them. I don't even care that I can download calculator apps for my phone (I have several of those, too). I'm just old-school enough to appreciate real calculators... and value! tavi.
I have the same design of calculator which I bought from poundland in the UK for one Pound.
Mine is ever so slightly different though. It has orange rubber sticky-out bits, and it came with a lid which can either cover the buttons or be clipped on the back.
The thing lives in my garage, and has taken huge amounts of abuse, but it just keeps on working. It has outlived two casio models costing an order of magnitude more money.
My whole question is it 1 dollar because its crap? Or 1 dollar because we're living in the future and its just gotten easier to make good computers- glad to see its the latter
Could be both! As in amazing digital processing power but physically crappy plastic, non replaceable battery, etc.
Today I learned that there are 8 miuntes to a calc-off.
I have an ancient mechanical Friden calculator that does multiple/divide and a method of doing square roots. (there is a model that directly does square roots). Does that count?