By Tech Powered Dad | October 8, 2010
UPDATE: It is now possible to buy a Casio Prizm. To get highly anticipated calculator, click here to buy your Casio Prizm on Amazon.
UPDATE: My Casio Prizm review is now live.
You float into classroom, hovering over the desks. All around you, colors are radiating throughout the classroom You make your way to the teacher’s desk, where you see a TI-Nspire Clickpad. Suddenly, in a flash of color, the Nspire transforms to a new calculator you’ve never seen before with amazing new capabilities. This isn’t just a weird dream. This is actually the promotional video for the new Casio Prizm, or fx-CG10.
As the name and video suggest, Casio’s Prizm has a full color display (65,000 colors, in fact). It’s 384×216 display is also backlit. When I reviewed the fx-9860GII, I found that Casio got the backlighting feature just right, and I’m optimistic that it’ll be the same here. It’s also a really elegant design. It looks more like an oversized cell phone that a graphing calculator. I’m betting more than a few students and parents will buy a Prizm just because it’s so attractive.
Digging into the promotional photos, the Prizm menu system seems to resemble the 9860GII, with a lot of the same (or very similar) apps. It’s hard to tell how close it is. Are we talking the same OS with a few added features? I’m guessing it’s more than that, as the Prizm is capable of displaying full color photos and allowing students to do curve fitting right on top of those pictures. Regardless, Casio graphing calculators tend to have really intuitive menu systems that will allow you to jump right in.
My first reaction is that the Prizm could fill a gaping hole is Casio’s lineup of graphing calculators. I recently reviewed the Casio fx-9750GII and fx-9860GII, and I was very impressed by both. They are remarkably cheap, easy to use, and full of features. However, both of those calculators are competition to Texas Instruments calculators that would be considered lower end at this point, such as the TI-83+ and TI-84+.
Casio didn’t really have anything to compete with the TI-Nspire. The Prizm really could be that calculator. The Nspire is not nearly as ingrained in school culture yet as the TI-83 plus and TI-84 plus before it were, and I think there’s an opening for Casio here. When I get a chance to check out the Prizm personally, I will let everyone know about it here on Tech Powered Math. The Casio Prizm release date was January 2011. You should buy your Casio Prizm on Amazon.