Casio fx-CG50 Graphic Calculator (UK version)

This calculator is extremely good at its performed functions. It's an excellent choice for students studying at higher level education, and is well preferred over the other calculator choices. The calculator itself comes with many different options, and is still one of the most advanced calculators for its time. Its a very good quality and it's quite easy to use for simple calculations, however for more complex ones you will need to find out how to use it. Its quite a chunky calculator compared to most, and the weight of it is pretty heavy, but this means that it does the job quite fast and has a much longer battery life. For me, the battery life is around 14 months with moderate use, however if you use it more frequently then it may need to be changed much sooner.

My daughter has started A-Level maths and said this was the best calculator there was. Imagine my surprise and shock (I could have fainted) when she told me said calculator was £120....yes yes one hundred and twenty pounds. After a lot of umming and erring we decided to get it for her, wanting the best for her education. I am told it does basically everything but make you a cup of tea. It is large for a calculator but thats not surprising considering how much it does. It covers you for the whole of A-Level content and will help her through university as well. It has a colour screen and while I couldn't use it she was getting on wonderfully with it once she had got to grips with it. She has said you can upload python programs to it, draw graphs, do trigonometric functions and a whole host of other wonderful things (I couldn't quite believe it as I grew up with a calculator that had four functions....+, ×, ÷ and -)! This is beyond amazing for a calculator and is a real investment to your or your child's education. I am really pleased we bought it for her. I also read a review that said to get the protective case, incase you drop it and to keep dirt and dust out. This was an excellent idea and I ordered it with the calculator. I would advise anyone to do the same.

I bought this mainly because it offers financial functions as well as many others (sometimes hard to find). It has proved very useful already. I like the way I can save solver equations for later use (only one equation can be loaded at a time) and connect the calculator to my computer for backup purposes. This calculator is very powerful but be prepared to consult the manual for best results.

This is the big brother of the 991EX, looks similar with the carbon fibre finishing, although the key layout varies a fair bit from that model. First impressions out of the box are that it's a lot bigger than the standard Calc, and it used 4 'AAA' batteries, I would prefer a rechargeable battery, but I suppose this keeps the cost down. You get a USB cable in the box to update the CG50 and connect it to your PC. There are masses of functions here, including conic sections, graphing, Python programming even a Periodic table. It can be quite difficult to find things that were just keys on the 991EX, but after an initial panic, pressing menu 1 gets a standard calculation screen up. Its natural competitor is the TI 84 which is a bit more expensive in the UK (about £130, depending on spec) and the CG50 is superior to the TI84 as it's faster and with a better screen, although the price has jumped from up to £110 over summer. The CG50 has a great screen, and calculations persist between sessions. I'm impressed with it, having colour on your charts really shows up the lines well. It's a big jump up from even the £90 Casio b&w Casio calculator. So should you buy it? I think it's a great graphing calculator and will help any A level student to understand functions, graphing and Conic sections. I think it improves your chances, and some of the Pearson books have examples using this calculator. Recommended.

This is my favourite calculator that is highly recommended for above GCSE, (or for super keen GCSE students) and all professionals like engineers and scientists. But I have a lot of recommendations for Casio for the next CG50: Show the derivative in X or Y solver, not just in trace in the graph mode. Provide dy/dx solver in graphing app so that x/y value can be found for a given gradient... and also for a given second derivative. Provide a gsolve option to identify points of inflections in the graph. And even identify concave and convex areas in different colour. Allow parametric equation solve features just like normal cartesian graph gsolve features as none of the g solve soft keys work at the moment when it comes to parametrically defined curves. Allow us to do everything including finding areas. Please move the radian degrees item to first on the list of settings as we have to frequently switch between degrees or radians and it requires too many key strokes. We can find the tangent/normal to a graph using sketch option but the equation of the tangent/normal cannot be pasted into the graphing app as a curve. If we could than it would be easier to find where the normal/tangent intersects other key points. Please allow us to adjust the font size. The bottom keys of the CG50 have been shaven off at an angle compared to the Classwiz 991EX. The height of the area we press is less. This makes key presses less comfortable than classwiz 991EX. Please could you restore full size. Allow recurring decimals option where we can enter and convert between recurring decimals and other formats. Allow us to find prime factors of a number, as other less advanced Casio's do. Allow calculations of volumes of revolution, and 3D depiction of volumes of revolutions. Conics app is isolated from graph app and is really not that useful... we need to be able to plot tangents or other curves with the circles to find intersections with the circle etc. Importantly, please could you allow us to define a cartesian graphs IMPLICITLY... the grapher becomes useless when an equation is implicitly defines. Other calculators are able to show implicit graphs. This allow circles to be plotted easily without a separate conics app. The new distribution app is almost useless in an exam conditions or computations setting. This is because it lacks all the features for calculating but visually shows the distribution (useful), which means you need to be in the stats app for calculations. So to make the ability to see the distribution accessible, I would like the option to visually see my distributions where I am doing my calculations (stats ap) and not have an isolated distribution app to go to. Please integrate the distribution ap features in the stats app. Infact, the z distribution shows in the stats ap. Please integrate the distributions app this way. When we get an answer for a probability in the stats ap, please allow us to copy / store in a variable like x/ANS so we can move to main and use that value for the probability in a calculation... often we have to remember a string of digits to copy. Transformation of 3D images in geometry app will be very useful. Please allow us to copy the ANSWERS from intermediate calculations in main rather then just the calculations line... this is a really annoying omission from the calculator. Also sometimes calculations line that used ANS in the calculation does not contain the answer from the part before if further calculations were executed...a software method to detect this would be nice where it takes the answer from the line before. Enable Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient calculations in the stats ap. Allow access to all Statistical Table of values (eg. Critical values) for all types of distribution such as for critical values for Hypothesis testing for zero correlation of bivariate data - PMCC values vs significance level and sample size. Allow us to access stats data as we still have to use a book to access these stats data, it should be in CG50, if it has a periodic table it should have this. Allow the stats app to perform Hypothesis testing for different distributions by taking all the required parameters (like numworks calculator does). Allow Negative binomial distribution function in the statistics aps. Recursion web graph does not start at the table start, please fix this. List commands have to be executed in main rather that in the stats app making it difficult for use. Again, please bring the ANS key to CG50 like the classwiz. Square root should also ideally be a direct key and not a shift operation. When we select a function operation using soft keys in main and it appears on the screen, knowing the syntax is often a problem, find a way to quickly view the syntax of the operation. Some of the vector operations and vector input are in different locations, bring them in a coherent place. Provide decametres and decimetres for length conversion. A dark mode option.

Before I bought this for my son I did research about this to see if it is allowed for GCSE plus for calculator it's high end price costing £118 but it is more expensive outside Amazon I found. It's has approval from exam boards which can be seen on Casio website. My son used the fx-CG50 said it's amazing it could understand maths better plus it has periodic table showing each element in detail. I asked my son will it help you better for GCSE maths, his reply was yes I think I will get much better grade with this calculator. Price I will say it is expensive 🫰 but if it helps to improve education by a bit it's cheap ☺️ Quality is amazing on this it's colourful display. It has it own charging port to charge when battery life is low. Quantity of ways of doing maths is amazing showing graphs etc ... Weight is good too and efficiency of the product looks amazing 🤩 Overall I would say it was an excellent buy to invest in my son future. 😃

This calculator is very good and has a large amount of features that make it very good for everyday use. It is great that it is allowed in all UK examinations as this means it can be used a GCSE level which is very useful as many graphical calculators cannot be used at this stage. Some of the features such as normal calculations and 2D graphing are very simple and easy to use, however some of the features can be a bit confusing at first and I had to watch some videos in order to figure out how to use all the features. The calculator is quite bulky and not very portable when compared to other non-graphing calculators however the size is understandable due to the large amount of features. The battery lasts a long time, I have had mine for about 4 months and the battery is still pretty much full. I also love the fact that you can connect it to your computer to install additional apps and games, personally I love playing the Flappy Bird game when I am bored. Would highly recommend this calculator, especially for anyone studying maths at GCSE or higher.

So yes, you can get free graphing calculators to run on your laptop or even on an androd phone - but you can't take those into the exam! Casio seems to have got both the GCSE and A-Level market in the UK stitched up, as the UK teachers tend to make thier models the top recommendation at each level. So if you are heading to A-level math's or university for Math's and engineering, this looks to be the "recommended buy". It is costly, but works well. Not taking an exam? The Android or tablet alternatives are really great because not only can you get free ones but you can change input paramets using slider controls to see the effect in "real time" if your smartphone has a good fast processor. It runs on 4xAAA batteries, and you get a set in the box with the device. You also get the connection cables to run this under Python - useful if you want to add a special favourite function. Don't tell teacher - but this means you can go online and get computer "games" to run on the CG50. The games are all basic compared with android phone ones - but you can get the typical "game boy" ones and there's a chess program too. It has the typical Casio sliding protective cover - but I'd still advise getting the zip case; the reason is the plastic cover doesn't keep out the fluff, dust and debris that seems to fill my college bag and it's expensive to replace this if you damage the keyboard buttons or drop it from your bag onto a hard floor or crush it under those heavy STEM textbooks!