When zooming in and out is instantaneous, as well as scrolling up and down, your brain starts to comprehend the entire perspective similar to moving from a large scale to small scale chart. Actually, better than that because you can zoom in and out faster than you can swap around charts and you can do it continuously and as many times as you like in seconds. Not to mention you can change your centered point of view (or even your perspective in 3D for some programs), not worry about flipping through a stack of charts or needing to find another because you moved off chart, etc.

Someone lamented the lack of terrain-perspective views on the old paper charts that showed you the vertical dimensions of land. Our chart plotter does that just fine and allows the perspective and POV to not only change around our current position, but to change the position itself and look at the POV and perspective from there (which is a great planning and preparation tool for moving into a new area). Our computer charting allows us to overlay high-resolution Google Earth images on our charts with varying transparency. Now I am never concerned about the accuracy of the 1918 survey used to create the charts or a shifted sandbar or a new reef, etc. I create my own electronic charts from the most up-to-date guide books containing small pictures of charts from highly accurate personal surveys (these are the only accurate charts of parts of Colombia and San Blas Islands and they do not exist outside of the small pictures in the guide books).

Electronic charts are by far safer than paper charts. With paper, you are stuck with the accuracy of Captain Cook's lead line, sextant and wind-up clock only.

For those who insist on carrying paper charts and having them in the cockpit along with the electronic versions - what do you do when your more up-to-date electronic versions do not agree with your paper ones? Do you doggedly stick to the paper? Does your brain handle the complete disconnect and somehow "averages" or compensates? Or do you shove the paper into a bin and forget about it while sticking to the dogma of always having paper charts in the cockpit? And for those who have made the statement that electronic are fine for offshore, but they always switch to paper when closing a coastline and working on the shoreline - are you nuts? There is no way to cruise Colombia or the San Blas Islands relying on the 1932 survey paper charts and not the exquisitely accurate electronic ones (eyeballs are always necessary of course).

Over the years I have needed to train my brain to do common tasks differently several times - for example, from writing by hand to typing on a keyboard, from handling physical photographs stored in a box or album to storing, viewing and sorting on a computer, and to reading on a Kindle instead of a paper book. Each of those were difficult changes at first (the writing part took forever for my brain to keep working on the narrative while my hands put it down), but each now seem completely natural and there are extended benefits of the new ways that were not available with the old. Heck, I don't even think I could write at all now without a computer - that has switched so throughly that my brain cannot work with my handwriting for longer than a to-do list. Not to mention that I ran out of white-out and erasers twenty years ago.

Mark