In fact, I learned that somewhere along the line Garmin added the ability to show fish symbols as colored balls in this view, color dependent on signal strength I’d guess, and that they’re saved for a while so that when you circle back on a “school” they’re still hanging there at the depths originally targeted. But actually I haven’t used that mode much recently and when I fired up the machine in the lab this afternoon, it turned out that one or another of the recent software updates has made it a lot better. Both chart levels are also going to include animated current arrows.īut I was rather struck with this screen shot of the new g2 Vision’s 3D Fishing mode, because I’ve never seen it looking so good on my test 5212. Which sounds like what both Furuno and Raymarine have been offering for a while, and which is a valuable aid to situational awareness. There’s also a new feature in both chart levels that allows a user to add contour shading to all depths below a selected figure. But I did immediately recognize that busy harbor as Little Creek, VA, because I once departed to Bermuda from there, and there are a few new features that print can describe better…įor instance, while the new g2 and g2 Vision charts are available on pre-programmed cards right now, starting in April customers will be able to download regions of either flavor to their own SD cards. I can’t really tell from the screen shot above what the “redesign” talked about in the press release is like, because it largely involves “transitions between zoom levels” and other possibly valuable improvements that you need to see in use. I’m not sure the 2009 charts ever got out, but I’m darn sure that all new editions go through some serious quality control. If you recall, the company got pretty excited about the 2009 edition, but then suffered some grief when a processing error caused a global recall. Today Garmin announced that updated 2010 g2 and g2 Vision BlueCharts are now available, apparently with some interesting changes.