What’s Different between TI-83 and TI-84?

Summary: The TI-83 and TI-84 are nearly keystroke compatible, but the 84 has a few new functions that the 83 lacks. This page lists them.

Upgrade: In late 2010 or early 2011, the TI-84 Plus and Silver were upgraded for ease of use; see “new in 2.55MP” many places in this note. If you have an 84, press [2nd + makes MEM] [1] and check your firmware version. If it’s less than 2.55MP, it’s worth your while to upgrade the OS to get the new features.

Differences between TI-83 Silver and TI-84 Silver

Display

Both the TI-84 Plus and the TI-84 Silver now come with these features:

• new in 2.55MP: With Mathprint, fractions and many equations now show up in a more naturalistic way.
• new in 2.55MP: Answers can be displayed always as fractions, always as decimals, or in “Auto”, where the calculator tries to match the form of the input.
• new in 2.55MP: Fractions greater than 1 can be displayed in mixed form: 15/2 or 7_1/2.
• Results screens now have a title in reverse video. This can’t be controlled by [MODE], as far as I know.
• Screens written by programs now display DONE and then a blank line when the program exits, so effectively programs are now limited to six-line output. I don’t know of any fix for this annoying change.

You can control these features (except as indicated) by pressing [MODE] [▲].

Keyboard

The keyboards are identical in labeling, but the 84’s design is curved, and all keys except the numeric keypad are smaller.

new in 2.55MP: On the home screen, you can just press [▲] repeatedly to recall past calculations. When you find the one you want, press [ENTER] it’s pasted to the screen where you can edit it if you wish before pressing [ENTER] again to execute it. ([2nd ENTER makes ENTRY] still works.

Menus

The 84 has a clock, which you can view or set by pressing [MODE].

new in 2.55MP: Four new “shortcut menus” claim to offer faster access to existing functions; press [ALPHA F1 makes FRAC], [ALPHA F2 makes FUNC], [ALPHA F3 makes MTRX], [ALPHA F4 makes YVAR]. Of these, [ALPHA F3 makes MTRX] really does seem to make it easier to enter matrices.

There are a few goodies for statistics students:

• new in 2.55MP: Stat Wizards prompt you for arguments to the statistical functions in the [STAT] TESTS menu, the [2nd VARS makes DISTR] menu, and possibly others I haven’t noticed. You can turn the wizards on or off by pressing [MODE] [▲] [▲].

• On the [STAT] CALC menu, there’s a new item D:Manual-Fit.

• On the [STAT] TESTS menu, there are two new entries: D:χ²GOF-Test and G:LinRegTInt. The 83 screen is shown at left and the 84 screen at right:

     

  However, χ²GOF-Test makes you compute the expected values on your own, so it’s not as useful as it could be. (See MATH200A Program part 6 for a downloadable program that does the whole job.)

• On the [2nd VARS makes DISTR] menu, there’s a new entry, 4:InvT, for finding inverse Student’s t. The 83’s selections 4–E become 5–F on the 84. TC3's MATH200 students care only about binompdf, which is [2nd VARS makes DISTR] [0] on the 83 and [2nd VARS makes DISTR] [ALPHA MATH makes A] on the 84, and binomcdf, which is [2nd VARS makes DISTR] [ALPHA MATH makes A] on the 83, [2nd VARS makes DISTR] [ALPHA APPS makes B] on the 84.

Catalog Functions

The following catalog functions are in the 84 but not the 83:

• χ²GOF-Test
• checkTmr
• ClockOff and ClockOn
• dayOfWk
• ExecLib
• getDate, getDtFmt, getDtStr, getTime, getTmFmt, getTmStr
• invT
• isClockOn
• LinRegTInt
• Manual-Fit
• OpenLib
• setDate, setDtFmt, setTime, setTmFmt
• startTmr
• timeCnv

The included Catalog Help application doesn’t describe these. Consult Appendix A of the Guidebook for the use of these catalog entries — except for ExecLib and OpenLib, which seem to be undocumented.

Differences between TI-84 Plus and TI-84 Plus Silver Edition

This page compares the two models I have, the TI-83 Plus Silver Edition and the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition. I know of only these differences between the plain TI-84 Plus and the Silver Edition:

• The Simultaneous Equation Solver, Polynomial Root Finder, and Pie Chart applications aren’t preloaded on the plain TI-84 Plus.
• The Silver Edition has 1.5 MB of flash ROM compared to the Plus’s 480 KB.
• The Silver Edition has swappable faceplates. (Whoop-de-do.)

If you have a plain TI-84 Plus, I’d be grateful for a report of any of the functions listed below that your calculator doesn’t have.

What’s New

• 31 Dec 2012: Fix a broken link to the Guidebook.
• 23 Dec 2012: Add the principal firmware changes; they’re marked “new in 2.55MP”. Add instructions for getting the firmware.
• (intervening changes suppressed)
• 22 Jul 2006: new document