Virtual Museum > Modern LCD
Although this calculator has the HP logo in the front panel, it is not actually made by Hewlett-packard. A group of enthousiasts took an existing HP calculator (the HP 30B) and changed the firmware to emulate (and enhance) the HP-42S. Above is a picture of the WP 34S and the 30B side to side, to show that the physical buttons and display are identical.
The main description page by the developpers is available below:
http://commerce.hpcalc.org/34s.php
This is not a graphic calculator, but if you have a look at the available functions, this could keep you busy for quite a while:
Functionality
The main description page by the developpers is available below:
http://commerce.hpcalc.org/34s.php
This is not a graphic calculator, but if you have a look at the available functions, this could keep you busy for quite a while:
Functionality
- Euler's Beta and Riemann's Zeta functions, Bernoulli and Fibonacci numbers, Lambert's W, the error function as well as Chebyshev's, Hermite's, Laguerre's and Legendre's orthogonal polynomials, and testing for primality,
- many statistical distributions and their inverses like Poisson, Binomial, Geometric as well as Cauchy-
Lorentz, Exponential, Logistic, Weibull for reliability analysis, Lognormal and Gaussian with arbitrary means and standard deviations, - programmable sums and products, first and second derivatives,
- extended date and time calculations based on a real time clock,
- integer computing in arbitrary bases from binary to hexadecimal,
- financial operations like mean rate of return and margin calculations,
- 84 conversions, mainly between universal SI and old Imperial units,
- 50 fundamental physical constants as precise as known today by national standards institutes like NIST or PTB, plus some more out of mathematics, astronomy, and surveying,
- complete Greek and extended Latin letter fonts covering many languages on this planet (upper and lower case in two font sizes each).
The keyboard is full of options, and hopefully you are not color blind, as there are 3 different functions keys. A key can have 5 different values, depending on the function. Here is an example below:
The User manual itself has 211 pages, full of functions, equations, constants and more. I downloaded it from the main site listed above, but if you want a copy it's right below. You really need to read it to understand the power of this little machine:
WP34S User manual (English)