On Jun 15, 5:15?am, HK wrote:
Anyone publishing these?

As in, $1000 chartplotters/fishfinders, six new units tested.

That sort of stuff.

Test them for what? To see if they work?

Almost any brand of electronics will be very reliable. In general,
units that don't fail in the first 90-minutes or so of use after
installation can be relied upon to give so many years of service that
they will ultimately be replaced due to obsolesence rather than
finally wearing out. That's why there are so very few technicians that
actually repair electronics- the rare warranty failures are typically
resolved by swapping out an entire unit.

Beyond reliability, a lot of the issues become very, very subjective.
Boater A prefers a certain type of display, Boater B prefers another.
Unless two units are attempting to prioritize the exact same aspects
of performance and operation, doing an objective review is pretty
difficult.
It requires the reviewer to impose his or her *own* subjective values
as a standard for comparison.

For example: MagicNav Technologies new GPS/plotter might have an
particularly bright display and an interface that uses only a couple
of large buttons that need to be pressed in some complex combinations
to perform a few dozen functions. Competing ElectroScan offers a unit
with a less brilliant display, but with 17 clearly labeled (if small)
push buttons that normally offer one-touch functionality.

Which is "better"?

Is the bright display a positive or negative? Can it bee "too bright"
except during the sunniest days? Or, will two different people have
two different, subjective, and equally valid opinions about the
brightness?

Is the 2-3 button interface a blessing for it's ease of handling in
rough seas, or a serious problem because many people won't manage to
remember that in order to access the page with the tide tables the
sequence is L,L,C,L,R,C,R,C,R,L? There would be opinions on either
side of the question. Is the 17 button interface better because it's
more easily used, or worse because when the boat is bouncing around
the smaller buttons are hard to press with a high degree of accuracy?

Is one unit better for people who are boating offshore in daylight
hours only, the other a superior choice for people who boat on inland
lakes and launch before sunrise to take advantage of the early morning
bite?
Or. will there be boaters in both of those categories who might choose
either of the units for subjective reasons that are personally valid?

Which one should the reviewer "knock"? Which one *can* the reviewer
knock without imposing his or her own subjective preferences as some
sort of universal standard?

Reliability has to be removed from the equation as well as basically
untestable. Effective testing would require leaving something running
for up to several years to note when it finally failed, and to be
thorough several copies of each model would need to be operated to be
sure that an early failure or a ridiculously long service life wasn't
a one-unit anomaly.

Because the choice of boating equipment is so extremely subjective,
head-to-head comparisons are a lot less useful than descriptions of
individual products that include a hgihlight of the major features and
what the associated benfits or operating characteristics might be. It
then falls to the reader to decide whether a particular product would
be
suitable for consideration when shopping for items of that type, or
not. A product with characteristics, features, and functions that are
inconsistent with what a boater wants for his personal boating
experience is always a poor choice, no matter how well it may have
been manufactured, the corporate reputation, the length of the
warranty, or whether it impressed somebody else.