Tomas4x4

I know nothing about delorme, but I own Colorado 300 pretty much since it was introduced and recently bought Colorado 400i as a backup/replacement because of the owesome price. I believe Colorado was intended as replacement for 60/76 series but then it did not meet expectations (for various reasons, mostly problem with software) and did not get the traction they were hoping for, Garmin chickened out and created 62/78 series. In my opinion, Colorado 400i for $199 is great deal. Comparable units cost 2x as much. Again, I can't speek for delorme but I'd pick Colorado 400i over 60csx (60csx does not support BirdsEye imagery for example).

I was wishing for some form of innertial navigation in my last trip to Grand Canyon. At one point, only 3 satelites were visible and the accuracy went down the drain. It is not like I was lost but my track and coordinates for geotagging were way off. It would be great if GPS could switch to some other means of determining position in difficult conditions.

What do you mean? I think the birdseye will cover on the topo map, you need to turn it off to see topo in that particular area BirdsEye is painted first, then the other map on top of it. Therefore you can see roads, contours etc. If you only want to see the BirdsEye, you have to turn off all other maps.

OK, the reasons: - Camera as an option (like on Oregon) - MP3 Player - hardware is almost all there and power requirements are probably negligible, would come in handy when resting or camping on backpacking trip, could also have voice recording if you want to take field notes that way - flashlight - really a last resort feature but when your trip lasts longer than expected, night comes and you are in the forest... personal experience is that it would be nice feature. I think that hardware wise it would be trivial addition and one more feature to put onto a feature list

Large screen and rock-n-roller controls is what is unique about Colorado. As for calendar, proximity alarm, day/night mode, it is all software and only matter of willingness (or laziness) on Garmin side. After all, map display with terrain shading came to GPSMAP 62 from Colorado/Oregon/Dakota.

SDHC works fine. I run a 16 GB card with currently around 10 GB of maps and 2 GB of Birdseye. I am using 16GB card in my Colorado 300 too but I consider it read only, I don't dare to write to it using the unit itself. It is slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow and I am not sure it is working quite well. My Colorado 300 is one of the first units so perhaps later ones are better behaved. I am using SDHC card reader and it is much faster that way. I have 'killed' one card trying to write to it using GPS, maybe the card was bad but it worked fine at first. Good thing is that BaseCamp supports that directly and there is 'fixed' MapSource version 6.15.11 which can send maps to any drive (I don't remember where I found it but I am not going to upgrade anytime soon). Building large map set is still slow but sending it to the 'unit' is very fast if you pick local drive as target (gets put into the garmin folder), then you can copy the IMG file to the card via card reader in matter of minutes, not hours. I have 4.7GB of maps on the card and would have more but I am hitting the tile limit. What maps do you have that you are not running into the tile limit even with 10GB of them? So when I said SDHC support, I really meant USB 2.0 speed mostly.

Reading this, I am rather disappointed with Garmin. They should have created Colorado II, add/improve the following Hardware: - USB 2.0 (USB 1.0 is so slow) - support for SDHC cards, up to 32GB - 3 axis compass - perhaps camera, MP3 player, LED flashlight Software - add all the missing features from Oregon and GPSMap series - add some new features - optional landscape mode => Perfect rugged non-touch screen GPS I believe that 62/78 is step up from their predecessors but step down from Colorado - small screen, complicated controls (I had GPSMap 76CSx for two years before Colorado so I know what I am talking about) I am probably going to get Colorado 400i (~$200) as second/backup unit and wait till Garmin come back to their senses and comes up with something really new or resurects Colorado.

No. Unless it is something commercial like BirdsEye. I think that killing Colorado was mistake. They should have restarted it instead: make some hardware improvements (USB 2.0, support for SDHC cards, 3-axis compass, perhaps camera) and add all the features from GPSMAP series people missed plus some new features, call it Colorado II and I would buy it. I definitely prefer the rock-n-roller over bunch of buttons like 'new' GPSMAP 62/78 have (I owned GPSMAP 76CSx for two years before I got my Colorado soon after it came out so I am talking from experience). I am even thinking about getting a backup unit while I still can (400i for ~$200).

I have just installed it and it seems to work fine so far, it definitely fixes this problem.

It is definitely better and well worth the download but it is still short of fixing the memory problems completely. I have 21 Birdseye items (all pretty much maximum size) and my memory consumption is 2.3GB and I have seen 2 or 3 memory related crashes so far (I always happily send the crash dump to Garmin). It also seems to be a bit more responsive when switching between birdseye items. I was able to resume downloading of BirdsEye imagery. I'll see how far it will let me go till it becomes unusable again.

Could you take screenshots and post them? You can upload your pictures to some free hosting site (I have used http://imageshack.us/ with success). This way we will have better idea what you are talking about. I know (and hate) that images are whitened when shown on the unit compared to when shown in Base Camp. It is fine for some imagery but in some cases, it causes loss of a lot of details. From your description, I am not sure it is what you have in mind.

I am using 16GB SDHC card in my Colorado 300. I have 4.7 GB of maps and some Birdseye imagery. It works fine. Problem you will run into with big cards is tile limit, it is something like 4000 tiles. I wanted to put complete Topo US 2008, Topo 24k West, Topo 24k SouthWest, Topo 24k National Parks and City Navigator on it but it is not possible. Just Topo US 2008 has more than 4000 tiles (6631 to be exact). Another limit is that image file cannot be more than 4GB. Third problem with large cards is that if you use Colorado for upload, it takes forever so you better get SDHC card reader (you can buy card+reader combo) but you will also need modified MapSource which can send the maps to any drive (I found about it in one of the posts about tile limit, unfortunately I don't remember where).

From my tests, it seems to be related to the zoom factor or perhaps the area displayed (how many 'tiles'). I am guessing the tiles are the key here because the 'darkening' is not linear. I'd think that choosing different 'spots' on map might verify that. If I zoom in and out in spot where four tiles touch, I might get more darkening than zooming in and out in between two tiles or in the center of a single tile. It is not huge problem since the typical zoom factor is in feet range than in miles range but still annoying, especially because it makes the already hard to read screen without backlight even harder to read. Any word from Oregon/Dakota users? Is it just Colorado or Oregon/Dakota have the same problem?

OK, some sample scenario people can try: Installed maps: City Navigator, Topo US 2008, Topo 24k West, Topo 2008 South West, Topo 24k National Parks, one custom map, some BirdsEye, Hawaii Topo Enabled maps:base map and Topo 24k West At 500ft - shading drawn once At 800ft - shading drawn twice (i.e. the screen 'darkens' once and then once again) At 0.2mi - shading drawn twice At 0.3mi - shading drawn twice At 0.5mi - shading drawn twice At 0.8mi - twice At 1.2mi - twice At 2mi - 4 times (~8 seconds) At 3mi - 4-5 times (~8 seconds) At 5mi - 16 times (~24 seconds) At 8mi - >20 times (~1 minute) At 12mi - ??? (~4 minutes) At 20mi - ??? (gave up waiting after 30 minutes) The time is time between changing the zoom and labels finally showing up. Enabled maps:base map and Topo US 2008 Similar bellow 8mi At 8mi - 16 times At 12mi - 32 times At 20mi - ??? (~7 minutes) At 30mi - ??? (~15 minutes) With City Navigator, any topo map or base map works fine, i.e. I get terrain shading but no 'darkening' is going on.

And I really hate what they did with the contour lines relatively recently, they used to be thin, now they are thick and when you zoom out a bit more, they merge into black blob (all advanced map settings left at "Auto").

At least I am not alone with this. I was thinking about trying hard reset but I think it would be useless. Let's hope Garmin will fix it (and preferably soon). I wonder if Oregon or Dakota have the same problem (I would think that the map drawing code would be shared between these units).

If you spent few seconds and actually DID read the post and DID look at the images, it is about shading, not about names. I hate when people are jumping into conclusion. And latest is latest relative to the time of posting which is 3.40.

I have observed rather annoying behavior: When I zoom out, the unit applies terrain shading multiple times ending often with completely dark image. It can take long time to redraw the screen. I took few screenshots while it was doing it. The more I zoom out over 0.2mi, the worse it gets. The map used was Topo 24K West and I also had some BirdsEye imagery loaded on my unit. Is anyone else seeing this?

I have tried Mobile Atlas Creator and I like a lot. Choice of so many sources is huge plus. Unfortunately, the limitation on KMZ files (maximum size as well as the fact that you can only have ONE on the unit) is rather severe. I am pretty sure that this limitation is quite intentional to ensure that there is no real competition for BirdsEye. The real game change will happen when Mobile Atlas Creator or some other software starts generating JNX files. The chance of that happening, I hope, is good. Until then though, we will have to live with BirdsEye "performance" and BaseCamp crashes (I am a subscriber). Let's hope Garmin will fix these crashes soon. I am having quite a bit of trouble after downloading some 15 large areas of BirdsEye: there are random crashes when I attempt to download another set, I have to select the area and start download at least 2 or 3 times before it actually starts happening. It typically crashes after the first try and new selection is gone, it crashes second time but usually the selection is still there after a restart. After that the download progresses slowly but very rarely crashes (best to leave it on overnight or while at work). One "feature" I really hate about BirdsEye is that it looks washed out when displayed on the GPS unit (Colorado 300). Not sure if the whitening is happening when the JNX file is created or when the content is displayed on unit's screen but it could make images which are often low contrast already almost useless because the terrain features are hard to see.

Done. It is here Thanks for the tip. Please comment there so that it gets some traction. Garmin is not charity and I think $30 a year is very reasonable price.

I have done some tests with the same area on High and Highest setting and found this: 1) File size for High is around 1/4 of size for Highest (in my case 10MB vs. 34MB) 2) Unexpectedly in the BaseCamp each quality has range of magnifications where it is best, it is not that Highest always produces better results. Highest has better resolution in range 80-300ft, High has better resolution in range 500ft-0.2mi, above that, it looks the same. 3) In the GPS, there is the same difference in ranges 20ft-300ft where Highest not surprisingly rules, at 500ft, I could not honestly tell any difference in quality and High was a bit better at 800ft-0.2mi range, but not much. At 0.3mi-0.7mi both are identical. For me, Highest seem like better choice overall choice (just get bigger card and more patience for download).

I have tried Birdseye and I like it , I have got subscription and even ordered new 16GB SD card to make room for lots of it (I hope my Colorado 300 will work with it). There is my wishlist: 1) More control over the brightness and contrast of the images on GPS, right now the BaseCamp is brightening the images when sending to the GPS which makes them look washed out and some features with lesser contrast are hard or impossible to see. Much better would be contrast and brightness and perhaps saturation sliders which would apply when sending the images to the unit (preview would be nice but not dealbreaker). I would really love if this was available on the GPS itself for ad hoc use based on actual conditions but that's probably not possible. At the very least, I'd like to turn the brightening off. 2) Given the size of the imagery, it would help to be able to select non rectangular area. The pictures ultimately consist of small tiles and there seems to be no technical reason why JNX files should cover rectangles only. Obviously UI to create the selection would be a bit more complex. One option would be to use something like MapSource does to select map segments for upload to the GPS. Having this would help my 3rd wish. 3) Faster download speed, right now, it is horrible. Downloading some 140MB of imagery more than 4 hours using fast cable connection is really bad. I can only hope that with more subscribers, Garmin will invest into more powerful hardware. It would not hurt if the download page showed estimate of remaining time. 4) More consistent images, I was downloading area around Kirkwood Ski Resort and half of the images were from winter with snow, half from summer. It is a weird mix and also winter images are hiding many terrain features. Please comment and add your own ideas and let's hope someone from Garmin will read this forum thread.

I wish it was true, none of routable maps on my Colorado 300 is showing street names (CN, Topo 24k West). The conditions under which it does/does not show seems to be more complex than that.

Thanks. That is very encouraging. What card do you use?

Even with subscription, although a bit better, it is still pretty bad.