So? Well for 1 it's very nice, albeit an RPN business calculator. A Prime it definitely isn't, if you've ever held a Prime in your hand you'd know the sensation of your IQ getting bumped 3 points. But the 30B is a really nice calculator, on par with the niceness of the 20s, 48g's, etc. Well maybe not exactly. But it does sport an ARM processor, umsure of all the specs. But the kicker is the firmware can be totally replaces. In fact this is why HP made it.

Enter Walter Bonin. And Paul Dale and Marcus Von Cube. They designed a whole new firware, turning the 30B into the WP-34s, an extremely precise calculatimg instrument that blows away most anything HP made in terms of precision (but not accuracy). I think it's called the 34s because there's a mode where you can render a calculation to 34 digits of precision! Truly remarkable. Anyone that has played around with various "torture tests" will know calculators of various makes very sometimes significantly in terms of precision and even accuracy. A notable exception is the HP 30S (and probably 33S also, but I don't have 1) made by Kinpo, not HP. Internally the 30s has 14 digits of precision, but only displays 10 (plus exponents). Tan (355/226), that ratio being dangerously close to pi/2, produces an accurate result out to 3 decimal places. I don't think any other HP does that. The Prime in CAS mode is very close, and I'll have to check, but falls a teeny tiny bit short.

And with a programming cable and 3 components (soldered to the mainboard) you can have your own 34s. New overlays are required duh.