12-06-2003, 08:26 AM
I'll ride the fence on this one. The most important part of any fishfinder is being able to use the features that maximize your advantage and the ability to understand what the magic box is telling you. Vexilars are awesome at instantly displaying whats happening below you at any givin second. Having seen one in action they are far better than lower end LCD's with limited power and poor resolution and my big thing, target separation. Having grown up on flashers (even before paper graphs were affordable), I know how they work and most importantly, what they are telling me. I use a Hummingbird 201HS (LCD) for ice fishing. It's a upper lower end (if that makes sense) LCD with 600 watts RMS and target seperation of 6". This means it can distiguse between fish and bottom if the fish are 6" or more off the bottom. Since I know how to manipulate the sensitivity and read the screen, I find it has near zero taget seperation. While the target separation is good, the lines of resolution suck. With the sensitivity set at +5 and the contrast set at -2 and the zoom set to look at ten feet of water, I can squezze about 60 pixels per foot. It only has 600 vertical pixels. The other thing I hate about it, it has no gray scale adjustment. It dispalys density in one color pixels, so I have to rely on the amout of pixels to deterime fish size. Thats O.K. when the whole fish is directly in the cone, but when the ones hit the edge, it's hard to figure out how big they are. With a machine with various degrees of gray scale, even a fish on the edge will show a lot of "back" if it's big enough. Whether you have a 100 dollar unit or 1000 dollar unit, it ain't gonna do you no good if you don't know what your looking at. My not so sage adivce to all you all using an LCD for the first time is "Turn those stupid fish symbols off". You'll learn to read the screen and get a much better idea of size and a better target separation than with them on. Fish symbols are only displayed in a few sizes, so even a huge fish shows up as the biggest symbol your machine will generate. Without gray scale it's hard for me to idenify how big a fish is, because he might be just loitering under the transducer and showing more pixels that he really is. With a Vexler, no such problem. It shows a color scale that uses the fishes swim bladder and body as an indicator of size. While all fishfinders use this (it's a physics thing, sound travels at a different speed through air, fish, weeds and other stuff like a jig head than it does water), the Vexler displays it in color. The more red (I think) the bigger the fish. On mine with no gray scale, I have no such indicator of size. I have to rely on the number of pixels. If a ten inch trout sits direcly under my fishfinder it will appear as a solid line. I have to look at the vertical pixels and then it's only a ruff guess. With an LCD with gray scale, it would still appear as a solid line, but, the scale would tell me the size. With a Vexler, the color on the screen determines the size. The denser the target the darker (?) the color. Wow, did this get long. Hey, it's Friday night and I'm sober, I have no life without ice. Was this confusing enough?
[signature]
[signature]