Calculators are not exactly premium devices, even though you'd likely think otherwise when you have to buy the anointed model for your kids' school.
That said, Casio is probably churning these things out with a BOM around $5-$10, so you can't really expect much from the display. We're spoiled by our phones, which (weirdly enough) have no single, definitive "good" calculator on either iOS or Android (and can't be used in class anyway).
Graphic calculators are extremely expensive for what they provide (compared to a cheap phone). Only thing holding them up is regulation (ie. being allowed in class and at certain exams), because otherwise, even a cheap phone can emulate a classical calculator (eg. hp 49g for us RPN fans), not to mention more advance tools (from apps to wolfram alpha).
I think a large fraction of what you’re paying for is the interface. Your phone can in theory do a lot more than a calculator, but having dedicated buttons for everything makes a calculator much better suited for its purpose.
Though maybe that’s just because nobody has come up with a great UI concept for a touchscreen calculator.
Yes,i know it's an emulator, but for the same price as a calculator, i get an emulated calculator + a bunch of other stuff, including wolfram alpha, huge database of knowledge online (wikipedia) + of course a phone.
...and on the other hand, i have this always in my pocket.
> have no single, definitive "good" calculator on either iOS or Android
When your device has an app store or allows third party software in some other way it will never have a "single definitive good app" for anything, there will be many bad ones and a maybe a couple of good ones, for math there's this good one: https://github.com/mkulesh/microMathematics
That said, Casio is probably churning these things out with a BOM around $5-$10, so you can't really expect much from the display. We're spoiled by our phones, which (weirdly enough) have no single, definitive "good" calculator on either iOS or Android (and can't be used in class anyway).