Nothing Comes Close

After being in the accounting business for more than 20 years, I’ve used many brands of calculators, and Sharp quickly became my favorite. Sharp has consistently produced the best machines year after year, never skimping on quality and always maintaining that wonderfully strong keypad touch that is so important. The keys on other calculator brands are horribly loose and spaced too close together; you can inadvertently hit another key or even two at the same time, and not realize it. But with Sharp’s keypads, the keys are spaced just right and have a heavy touch; so you don’t lose time going back over the tape to see if you’ve made a mistake.

The overall sturdiness of Sharp calculators is terrific; no flimsy plastic or cheap components. Over the years I have dropped my Sharp calculators on the floor and never ended up with a pile of plastic chips or a machine that no longer worked. In fact, at one time while I was climbing a long flight of cement stairs, I dropped my EL-2630 on the hard cement;- I was almost afraid to look, thinking that my machine had just gone to office machine heaven. Instead, there it was…completely intact, and functioned just fine when I later plugged it in.

My own personal favorite Sharp model is the EL-2630GII, because of the many features it has that are necessary in accounting and business transactions. This particular model is of course a printing calculator; it prints your calculations onto regular 2 ¼-inch tape, and uses regular two-color ink ribbons. Many other brands use thermal paper and no ink ribbon, which I do not like; the impressions are often too soft and you practically go blind trying to read the numbers off the tape!

The features included in the Sharp EL-2630GII are:

· Print/Grand Total/Item Count: You can choose to have your machine print onto tape or switch to no-print mode; you can have a grand total print or not; and you can switch to item count or no count.

· Decimal Selector: You can choose from zero to six decimals, including "F" mode, which is the floating decimal.

· Rounding Selector: Rounds decimals up or down.

· Constant/ Add Mode: The constant mode remembers such things as the first multiplicand and the divisor. The "add" mode is great for adding large lists of numbers without having to press the decimal point key.

· Paper Feed Key: Other brands often omit this, and you wind up having to pull the paper tape up manually to view recent entries.

· Mark-Up and Margin Key: Great for those times when you need to calculate margins, and to add specific markup percentages to item pricing.

· Reciprocals, Percentages, and Power: Most other brands will not include such functions unless you purchase their "scientific" version. But Sharp seems to realize that now and then, even we accountants need to know what 25 to the 6th power is!

· Clear Last Digit Entered Key: This is really handy! Instead of having to press the "clear" key and lose an entire number, you can simply back up one digit!

· A very large, very clear display, with numbers that are not "squashed" together: Other brands often have such small numbers that are so closely placed that you go nuts trying to read them.


Durability, dependability, great functions, and the best keypad touch are what make Sharp my all-time favorite. Try one out at your local office supply store—you’ll feel and see the difference immediately.