Differences among TI-83s and TI-84s (2024)

Summary:Texas Instruments’ popular line of TI-83 and TI-84calculators includes eight models, of which four are listed on TI’s Web site.What do you get by choosing one model over another?

Quick Overview of Current Models

The TI-84 Plus CE Python is listed on TI’s Web site, announced for “Fall 2021”. I don’t have anything to say about it on this page.

From Black&White TI-84s to Color TI-84s

TheTI-84 Plus C Silver Edition (TI84+CSE for short)was released in 2013. It addscolor and higher screen resolution to the TI-84 Plus. Part of thatscreen resolution goes for a two-line bar at the top: the first rowshows selected mode settings and battery charge; the second rowsometimes shows context-sensitive help. All the math and statisticalfunctions and graphs carry forward from the black&white TI-84 Plus, andthere are some enhancements.

The TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition is no longeravailable from Texas Instruments, though googling for it (as ofNovember 2021) quickly turns up retailers that still have it for sale.Though the TI-84 Plus CE (next paragraph) is a better buy, I’m keepingthe TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition on this page. Those things are builtlike tanks, and you may be able to get one used and save some money.

TheTI-84 Plus CE(TI84+CE for short), introduced in 2015, isabout half the thickness of all the earlier TI-83s and TI-84s, a bitmore rectangular, and 30% lighter (201g versus 287g). It has almost exactly the same menus as theTI84+CSE, but a new processor and memory-mapped LCD make it muchfaster— up to 300%faster, according to thereview at Cemetech.net.It’s got more than six times the RAM ofthe TI84+CSE, which means greater capacity for programs and data.

I can’t see any reason to buy a new TI-84 Plus C SilverEdition. Despite lacking the “Silver” moniker, the TI-84Plus CE is faster and cheaper than the TI84+CSE, and it hasmuch more capacity too.

Seealso:TLM’s Buyers guide to the TI-84 Plus family

Documentation for Color TI-84s

Since I last updated this page, Texas Instrmentshas released theTI-84 Plus CE Reference Guide.It’s less than half the size of the older Guidebooks, which can be agood thing or a bad thing depending on how you use manuals, if you usethem at all.

Although the TI84+CSE is no longer sold by TexasInstruments, the Guidebookis still available, and it’s more than double the size of theGuidebook for the TI-84 Plus CE. Since the two models havenearly identical functions, you may want to download the largerguidebook to get more information.

Where Is Color Used?

• The [Y=] menu sets colors for function graphs.
• The [2ndY= makes stat plot] screen lets you set colors forstatistical graphs.
• [DRAW] menu commands let you set color for the grid, theaxes, and the border. You can also turn the picture background on oroff.
• The [2ndzoom makes format] screen lets you specify grid color.

Menu Changes from Black&White TI-84s

TI84+CSE	TI84+CE	Feature
	✔	Keys and labels are in lower case, a nice change that improvesreadability in my opinion.
✔	✔	Catalog Help is available on all menus: press [+] for help onthe selected menu item.
✔	✔	[MODE] screen: For function plots, CONNECTED hasbecome THICK, DOT has becomeDOT-THICK, and THIN andDOT-THIN are new. (It’s possible to set those othermodes for individual equations in black&white TI-84s, on the [Y=]screen.)
✔		[MODE] screen: select fractional answers. (The CSE has onlyautomatic and decimal, but you can always press [math] [1] [enter] toconvert an answer to a fraction.)
✔		[MODE] screen: go to graph format screen. This is auseless feature in my opinion, since [2ndzoom makes format] works onevery TI-83/84 model.
✔	✔	[2ndZOOM makes FORMAT] screen: grid lines. The black&white models have onlyGridOn and GridOff; the color models giveyou a three-way choice of GridOff, GridDot(equivalent to the old GridOn), andGridLine. There’s also a new GridColorchoice, with 15 options.
✔	✔	[2ndZOOM makes FORMAT] screen: Detect Asymptotes does amuch better job with some graphs. Compare these two graphs of(x−11)/[(x−7)(x+2)]. Detect Asymptotesdefinitely slows down the graphing, but it’s worth it to haveaccurate graphs.
✔	✔	The [MATH] menu has a new sub-menu, FRAC, thatduplicates the last four items of the [MATH] NUMsub-menu.
✔	✔	[STAT] CALC menu:QuickPlot&Fit-EQ is new: drop points on a graphscreen and do a regression on the fly.
✔	✔	The [WINDOW] screen lets you set TraceStepexplicitly.
✔	✔	The [VARS] menu has a new sub-menu, COLOR.

Other Changes from Black&White TI-84s

• The screen dims after 90 seconds of inactivity, and the calculatorturns off after about five minutes of inactivity. (Screen dimming isnew because the older calculators didn’t have backlitscreens.)
• A short description now follows most error messages.

From TI-83 to TI-84

The black&white TI-84 Plus and TI-84 Plus Silver Editionwere released in 2004; there was no “original TI-84”.

TI upgraded the firmware on shipped models in 2010 and againin 2011, without changing the model names. If yours was manufacturedbefore 2012, you can check the firmwareversion and download new firmware if necessary.

When I checked in November 2021, the black&whiteblack&white TI-84 Pluswas still being sold, but TIno longer has a page for the black&white TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition.

Besides color,what does a TI-84 Plus get you over a TI-83 Plus?

Display

Both the TI-84 Plus CE and the TI-84 Plus C Silver now come with thesefeatures:

• Added in 2.55MP: With Mathprint, fractions and many equations now show up in a morenaturalistic way.
• Added in 2.55MP: Answers can be displayed always as fractions, always as decimals,or in “Auto”, where the calculator tries to match the formof the input.
• Added in 2.55MP: Fractions greater than 1 can be displayed in mixed form: 15/2 or7_1/2.
• Results screens now have a title in reverse video. Thiscan’t be controlled by [MODE], as far as I know.
• Screens written by programs now display DONE and then ablank line when the program exits, so effectively programs are nowlimited to six-line output. I don’t know of any fix for thisannoying change.

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

Keyboard

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

Added in 2.55MP: On the home screen, you can just press[▲] repeatedly to recall past calculations. Whenyou find the one you want, press [ENTER]. It’s pasted tothe screen where you can edit it if you wish before pressing[ENTER] again to execute it. ([2ndENTER makes ENTRY] stillworks.

Menus

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

Added in 2.55MP: Four new “shortcut menus” claim to offerfaster access to existing functions; press [ALPHAF1 makes FRAC],[ALPHAF2 makes FUNC], [ALPHAF3 makes MTRX], [ALPHAF4 makes YVAR].Of these, [ALPHAF3 makes MTRX] really does seem to make it easier to entermatrices.

There are a few goodies for statistics students:

• Added in 2.55MP: Stat Wizards prompt you for arguments to thestatistical functions in the [STAT] CALC menu,the [2ndVARS makes DISTR] menu, and possibly others I haven’tnoticed. You can turn the wizards on or off by pressing[MODE] [▲] [▲].

• The [STAT] CALC menu has a newitem, D:Manual-Fit.

• The [STAT] TESTS menu has two newentries, 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 theexpected values on your own, so it’s not as useful as it couldbe. (See MATH200A Program part6 for a downloadableprogram that does the whole job.)

• The [2ndVARS makes DISTR] menu has a newentry, 4:InvT, for finding inverse Student’s t.The 83’s selections 4–E become 5–F on the 84.

Catalog Functions

The following catalog functions are in the 84 but not the83:

• 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.Consultthe pared-downTI84+CE Reference Guide.

TI-84 Plus versus TI-84 Plus Silver Edition

Functionally these are almost identical. I know of only thesedifferences between the plain TI-84 Plus and the SilverEdition:

• The Polynomial Root Finder and Simultaneous Equation Solverapplication, PlySmlt2, isn’t preloaded on the plain TI-84Plus, though you candownload it from TI’s site.download it from TI’s site.The Pie Chart application isn’t preloaded on the plain TI-84Plus, and I couldn’t find a download.
• The Silver Edition has 1.5MB of flash ROM compared to thePlus’s 480KB.
• The Silver Edition has swappable faceplates. (Whoop-de-do.)

Upgrading TI-84 Plus and Silver

The black&white TI-84 models go back to 2004, but somefirmware upgrades added features:

• OS version 2.53MP, released in February 2010according to Wikipedia,added MathPrint and some other features. See83Plus:OS:OS 2.53MP Changesat WikiTI.
• OS version 2.55MP, released in January 2011according to Wikipedia,added more new features. See“New in 2.55MP” many places in this article.
• There have been further OS upgrades, and as ofNovember 2020 the latest firmware revision is 5.6. TI has postedvery briefrelease notes,with a link to get the upgrade.

  If you program your TI-84 in C or in z80 Assembler,or if you use third-party programs written in those languages,you may want to think twice before upgrading the OS. Cemetech announcedin May 2020 that OS release 5.5.1 for the French TI-83 Premium CEinhibits C and assembler programs from running, and also prevents youfrom reverting to an older OS version. A few days later,Cemetech reportedthat the same changes would apply in release 5.6 for the TI-84 PlusCE.

If you have a black&white TI-84, press[2nd+ makes MEM] [1] to check the firmware version. Ifit’s older than 2.55MP, you can download new firmware fromthis pageto getMathPrint and other features.

The TI-83 Models

The original TI-83 was released in 1996, theTI-83 Plus in 1999, and the TI-83 Plus Silver Editionin 2001,according to Wikipedia.

Keyboard differences are few.The TI-83 Plus replaced the originalTI-83’s dedicated[MATRX] key with an [APPS] key, moving matrixfunctions to[2ndx-1 makes MATRX]. The finance functions from[2ndx-1 makes FINANCE] on the original TI-83 were moved to aFINANCE app. All the later TI-83/84 models have the samekeyboard as the TI-83 Plus, though the shapes of the keys have changed.

Programming differs a bit between the originalTI-83 on the one hand, and all other TI-83/84s on the other.The TI-83 uses 83P program files; the others can run 83P files butnatively use 8XP files, which the original TI-83 cannot run.8XP files added new features, such as letting programs display lower-caseletters.

The original TI-83 and TI-83 Silver are no longer listed onTI’s Web site,but the TI-83 Plus is. I don’t see any reason to buy a new TI-83Plus, because the TI-84 Plus is about the same price and has morespeed, more memory, and more features. However, a used TI-83Plus can be a good buy; just spend a little time to make sure that thecharacter and graph displays are working correctly.

Confusingly, there is a TI-83 Premium CEcalculator, released in 2015 as the French version of theTI-84 Plus CE.