Cruising Sailors Forum Archive

Explorer electronic charts are only available if you buy a Garmin plotter.

You can buy C-Map charts that may include some of the data, but even Explorer doesn't know what and how much (but they do know some is missing). Look at http://chatter.explorercharts.com/?p=8920

To some of your other points:

Whether you measure resolution by DPI, lines, whatever; currently common print is much better than common digital displays. While the best displays (not yet available on any dedicated chart plotter) exceed the resolution of the human eye, they do so over only a small area.

I do carry a sextant, complete site reduction tables (S tables) are a small 30 page booklet, a chronometer is unnecessary for even fairly accurate navigation. I don't expect to have to use them.

You can carry all your electronic charts on optical disks, but it will do you no good if the electronics to read them are toast. A lightening strike is far from the only way electronics can malfunction. I have had three incidents of failure but no lightening. Fortunately backups in each case. In two cases the failure was subtle enough not to discover for a significant period of time.

Piloting is where electronic displays are most useful, in my opinion, as you are concentrating on a limited immediate area which can be made to pan with your motion. Large scale route planning is were they are least useful, as you need the largest area possible with the most detail resolvable by the eye. The digital display gives you a window into the world where you have a choice between detail and area. Take a large printed chart. Cut a hole in a piece of cardboard 8 x 10 or whatever your display size is. Pan that over your chart hiding the rest. That's what you are seeing. Do the same thing to the Mona Lisa, panning your 8x10 window over it. Or alternatively shrink it to 8x10 so you can see the whole thing. Is it still the same painting? Your eye can take in and usefully process many more pixels that the largest practical digital display can produce. You have adapted to these shortcomings, and welcomed the trade off for the sake of its advantages (I have too, for the most part). But I will not accept that it has no disadvantages. The main advantage of electronic media is accessibility and organization. The drawback in its current state is presentation.

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