Cruising Sailors Forum Archive

It is not a matter of resolution, it is presentation and cognition...

all of the information is there. But a large printed page puts more of it in your vision faster than the highest resolution displays used in yacht cartography. It is a question of man-machine cognition. No, you are not going to navigate a narrow creek zoomed out to the highest level (though apparently some sail oceans that way), but when you are scanning an area larger than the display can present at full scale for hazards (or best routing, or a few other things), the printed chart wins. The human eye and visual perception is better suited to acquiring information from a large area that more completely fills the visual field, than a dense small area in the center of it. We evolved that way for a variety of reasons, and computers have not de-evolved us (yet).

I don't know if this has ever been tested by academia in marine cartography specifically, but it has been tested in other contexts. It would be pretty easy to objectively test: pick a fairly intricate area like Penobscot Bay or Puget Sound, put 10 people in front of a printed chart and ask them to point out all the navigational hazards they see between here and there in one minute. 10 more people same area on a 12" chart plotter. It's a cheap test to run but I already know what the result would be.

Electronic cartography has many advantages over paper charts, that's why many people including myself use them. But saying that one is a complete and uncompromised replacement for the other is provably wrong. At current state of the art, the paper presentation is like diving into the ocean and observing a reef, vs. looking at it through a glass bottomed bucket. In either case, you can see everything there is - but it is no where near a comparable experience.

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