Finder, flasher, or camera

[Fishrmn]

A LCD usually has a 1-2 second delay

Nope. If you ever wanna put the two side by side, I'll show you that there is no delay if you watch the extreme right hand side of the display on a good LCD graph. I notice that your user name is MichganAngler, and I would guess that that means you are from Michigan and very familiar with ice fishin' and all. But there ain't no 1 or 2 seconds of delay. Urban legend of the old U.P.

On a solid platform such as ice, nothing gets past a trained eye with a flasher.

Unless you're looking at something other than the flasher at the moment a fish swims by. Then the graph beats a flasher any day.

Transducers on most boat mounted fish finders are at least 15-20 degrees (sometimes as high as 60 degrees) while ducers specifically designed for ice fishing are usually 8-12 degrees.

Which means they are too narrow in my opinion, unless you are fishing really deep water. In 30 feet of water, the cone of a 20 degree transducer is only 10 feet in diameter, or a 5 foot radius. An 8 degree cone would only be 4.17 feet or only a 2 foot radius. Something just over two feet away from your jig isn't gonna show up. You could have your jig almost next to a fish and not know it. If you jig too aggressively you could scare it away and not even know it was there. Not nearly enough real estate in my book. When you start looking at deeper water then the narrow cone starts to make sense.

Target separation isn't a function of cone angle. It is a function of frequency and duration of pulse of the sonar signal.

It all boils down to personal preference, but I've used flashers and graphs, and I'll stick with a graph any day. And there is no point in using the flasher display on a graph. The sonar signal is the same, it's just displayed in a different format. One that doesn't show any of the history.
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