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126 of 129 humans found the following review helpful.
Misleading and very costly: buyer beware
By Peter V. Owens
Although the packaging offers coverage of the U.S., Canada, Caribbean, and South America on this costly CD, you may only unlock a very fixed "region" with your initial purchase. Says Garmin tech support, "When you buy BlueChart, you're entitled to one free region, and then further and added regions may be purchased for $116.65." The word "free" here reflects Garmin's in general abysmal use of language found on their Web site, a labyrinth of obfuscation tangled in their arcane and ultra-paranoid "unlocking" engineering and concealed prices. Unlike their Topo and City Navigator CDs where you get a lot of maps for your money, BlueChart gave me a fixed sliver of southwest Florida for my buy price. When I went to load Cape Cod, I came upon I would need to pony up another $116 for this little region. To unlock everything on this CD would costs many, galore thousands of dollars, and nowhere is this clear to the unwary consumer.
What is particularly grating in all this is that Garmin relies on U.S. government maps and GPS satellites that we taxpapers have already salaried for. I find the selling of Blue Chart in truth deceptive, specially given the crucial public safety significances of nautical mapping.
I would add that boat-towing travelers and nautical siteseers will need shoreside mapping and road info, for which these charts are useless, so you'll need further and added map productions and memory cards to show roads, parks, dining, and local amenities. Buyer beware.
72 of 75 humans found the following review helpful.
Comprehensive, fast, and easy to use
By Barnaby Dorfman
The Garmin "Bluecharts" are vector charts, which means they use mathematic algorithms to store all the lines and features of a nautical chart. I have steered away from these in the past because they tended to give up a lot of detail vs. "Raster Graphic" charts, which are fundamentally photographic images of paper charts.
With "Bluecharts" they have gotten to a level of detail (including multiple colors) that they look closely as good as a paper charts. The vantages of vector charts is that they take up much less room on your hard drive and run much more quickly on a PC. This is primary when you are zooming in and out to see your depth or proximity to a wreck while moving on a boat.
I use mine with an eTrex Legend and am competent to load most of the detail (depth, obstructions, nautical aids, etc) onto the handheld. For the full look of charts, I connect the GPS unit to my laptop. The package likewise includes tidal charts, which are much more elaborated and exact than the little tide chart booklets I employed to use. Overall, it makes navigation a breeze...your boat is mechanically represented on the chart and you have a lot of simple tools to calculate distance/time to a given destination. It likewise incorporates further and added data on Marinas and service locations.
The Garmin application the charts run on, "MapSource" allows you to without apparent effort switch amid map types. I have "Americas Bluechart," "MetroGuide" (streetmaps), and "Tides and Marine Services," all without having to reconnnect the GPS unit.
The only hassle is the "Unlock" process, which is a bit time consuming and involves providing the Garmin website with a bunch of codes, including the serial number of my GPS unit to unlock a set of charts from the CD-ROM. I'm not sure, but I think it will only work with that specific unit, which worries me a bit as I am thinking with regards to buying a second unit for backup.
49 of 51 humans found the following review helpful.
Simply the best!
By A
I'll cut right to the chase--if you have a Garmin GPS unit that is MapSource compatible, and use it on the ocean, buy this CD! Garmin's Water Ways & Lights CD is a total joke equated to the BlueChart CD. The level of detail is an precise duplication of NOAA paper charts--very, very precise and very, very detailed. I use this software with my GPSMAP 162, and the only drawback is that with the detail level set to high, it slows the screen redraw rate down considerably. but, when you're genuinely on the water, this isn't even noticeable. Bottom line--this is a great product.
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