I LOVE my Meridian Color. Only had it a couple of weeks, but I'm up to 10 caches and planning to use it back east on my vacation for both detailed street mapping and caches i've downloaded while I'm there. I haven't experienced difficulty with seeing in the sun. I've set the backlight for only a short period, but you can make it longer. From what I've read the Color seems to have less bugs with Direct Route as complared to the Explorist, which was the other model I was considering.