Casio has unveiled its new fx-CG100 graphing calculator at a mathematics education conference in Chicago. The fx-CG100, now classified as part of its ClassWiz line of products, is the successor to the fx-CG10, fx-CG20, and fx-CG50 (or Casio Prizm) calculators.

In early 2011, Casio released the fx-CG10/fx-CG20, or Casio Prizm, graphing calculator. It was the first graphing calculator with a full-color screen, narrowly beating out TI announcing a color-screen refresh of its TI-Nspire calculator in February 2011. In fact, the announcement of those two calculators led to an impassioned article entitled "Casio Prizm: Why TI Calc Coders Should Abandon the Nspire CX" here on Cemetech, and over the following few years, Cemetech's hobbyists and programmers embraced the calculator for its easy programmability in C. In a rapid answer to the clichéd question "can it run Doom?", developer MPoupe announced a Doom port called CGDoom for the Casio Prizm in mid-2012.

The fx-CG50 was a faster version of the fx-CG10/fx-CG20, released in 2017, with a sleeker case but otherwise retaining the same operating system, AAA batteries for power, LCD, and user interface. We reviewed it here when it came out. Python arrived for the fx-CG50 in 2018, after TI announced Python support for its TI-84 Plus CE color-screen graphing calculator, but seemingly before the first TI-84 Plus CE Python Edition was available for purchase. Since then, the Casio Prizm remains a very popular calculator, especially among European students.

Casio has now announced the fx-CG100 (which will be known in France as the Graph Math+ Lycée) at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) conference in Chicago. They describe the new calculator:

We don't know much about this calculator's technical specs yet: from the photos that Casio has provided, including in a tweet, the calculator has a markedly different keyboard layout than its predecessors, round keys that remind us of prototypes of Zero Calculators' new calculator, and its manual shows that it still uses AAA batteries rather than a rechargeable Li-Poly pack (under an unusual round battery cover), and still has a USB port and a 2.5mm I/O port.

We look forward to bringing you an in-depth review as soon as we can get our hands on one of these calculators!

Edit: Adriweb and Critor of TI-Planet have compiled the known technical and software specs of the calculator, as the Graph Math+ Lycée is already available for purchase. Spec-wise, it's very similar to the fx-CG50, but the software no longer permits Casio Basic programming or the addition of C addins. If true for the US market as well, this will render the calculator essentially irrelevant to the graphing calculator hobbyist community, and one fewer of a shrinking set of calculators that allow the curious STEM student to explore programming beyond a simple language like Python or TI-BASIC.

More Information
Casio fx-CG100 / Graph Math+ Lycée Product Page and Manuals (French)

I'm not too excited about this one. If its specs are so similar to the fx-CG50, then I don't see the point of replacing it with this model.

The classwiz-style keypad is also a turn-off for me. Seventeen (17) of the buttons are wasted on navigation that could've easily been reduced to at least ten (10) with better design. This leaves only twelve (12) buttons for quick access to features -- if what you need isn't there, you gotta find it in the catalogue! Endless menu-scrolling fun!

The situation was already bad enough on the Casio FX-991CW (which uses near-identical quick access keys,) so imagine the pain here with so many more functions... At least give us some configurable keys for crying out loud!

EDIT: It appears you guys have some conflicting information on your website

Thank you very much @HydrideGS.
It's fixed.

They mostly did the (software) change to minimalize the overall feel and have a more intuitive UI (NumWorks is sure pushing everyone in that direction!) while aligning everything with the classwiz scientifics.
Too bad we lost some features along the way yeah...

You're welcome.


Who even IS NumWorks? I've heard of them but that's about it. Also, I think the ClassWiz design itself is flawed from the very beginning, and this calculator just added more useless buttons that could've been used for other quick actions.

ALSO WHY IS THE DOWN ARROW BELOW THE TOP TWO ROWS GRRRRRR

I mean, the answers to your questions is just a google search away
For both NumWorks and the design choices (the have some blog thingy regarding how they came up with all that, focus groups, feedback, etc.)

Just had a look at their website. I love how much they're tooting their own horn, like their calculator is somehow unique.
NumWorks website: "The calculator reinvented."
Also NumWorks website: *advertises features that have come standard with all graphing calculators for decades at this point*

For $100 you could get a more capable fx-CG50 (or maybe this, when it comes out)

I have mixed feeling because they removed Basic and the ability to expand the list of add-ins with custom ones, but at the same time Casio had done a poor job at keeping Basic up to today standards and it barely evolved beyond the limited calculator RAM:

-Unlike the TI-84 Plus CE where a TI-BASIC game can be 1.5 megabytes large, on the fx-CG10/20/50 you can't run archived programs so you have over 24 times less disk space to work with.
-On the graph screen, the drawing speed is an absolute disaster. On the CG10/20 it takes a full second to draw three pixels.

However by removing Basic you also remove hundreds of math and educational programs that could have added a lot of extra functionalities to the fx-CG100 and Graph Math+ Lycée. I guess that rather than reworking Basic internals to improve its performance to competitive levels they decided to ditch it completely.

This. It's like there's this movement to get everyone using Python as possible. The Raspberry Pi and Arduino are two other examples. But sometimes you just... don't need (or want) Python.

If you remember my QIXBALL app, I made a port of it to the fx-CG50 once. It used Casio BASIC... and it was somehow slower here than it was on a regular 84 Plus CE. The documentation is just as poorly maintained.

I also love how the fx-CG50 has this huge advertisement on the box saying it has 16MB of flash memory (which isn't even worth bragging about in today's day and age) but you can't even use it for programs. Only add-ins.

The "movement" to use Python isn't from the calc manufacturers. Those just follow what the governments (especially France but also various other ones in Europe) say is required.

I reached out to Casio contacts, and unfortunately even they won't have their hands on the fx-CG100 for quite a few months. I'll share any updates when I can.

Oh dear.

I just had a look at the two calculators side-by-side on TI Planet, and...the fx-CG100 isn't looking too hot.

Granted, we still don't know everything about the new calc, but it has four times less flash storage, lacks basic MicroPython features that the CG50 has, and doesn't really improve on the CG50's existing flaws.

As much as I wanted this successor to make it to America, it looks disappointing...

Nah the Python is the same (+ now a getKey function).

Maybe you misread something about KhiCAS not being available anymore thus no more improved Python with things like numpy.

Regarding the storage, the chip is also the same (16 MB), so the limitation is software side.

More precisely, the flash size is 32M, on the fxcg50 16M are used for the OS and 16M are available for the user. On the Graph Math + (French equivalent to the fxcg100), the flash size is the same but only 4.7M are available to the user, like on the fxcg50 australian model. One reason behind this reduction might be that the australian and french model could share the same white keyboard (vs black keyboard for the US model) ? We'll see next year (or before?) what the fxcg100 US model provides.
This back to school, the fxcg50 sales were about the same as the Numworks sales on amazon US site (peak sales at about 3K/month vs about 100K for the ti84color and 50K for the 84monochrom). If this is representative of the whole market, then Casio and Numworks will fight again next year for the few % marketshare of non-TI calculators. It seems to me that people buying Casio in the US are (in average) more informed of the product they buy that people buying a TI84 calculator, because of the dominance of TI. Providing a better UI is certainly a good idea from Casio, but I think they underestimate the bad effect of reducing the flash available to the user and not allowing addins.
It's perhaps not too late, if you read this and agree with my conclusion, I would suggest that you contact Casio if you didn't already.

"Better" is a HUGE understatement here. The 84 Plus CE's UI seriously looks like something from an early 2000s phone. And even some of those looked better.

Still not sure why they reduced the available flash memory though. Did they really want to get rid of add-ins that much?