Magellan Meridian Color

[hawkeye266]

what does anyone think of the Magellan Meridian color for general use and for geocaching. thanks for any info.

[+embra]

Meridians in general are great units (I have a platinum). In my readings here and elsewhere, the screen has been criticized for being difficult to see in sunlight; the backlight needs to be on much of the time. If you are seeking a color screen, you may want to give consideration to the explorist 500 and 600 models, which have much improved displays.

 

Aside from the screen issues, I think Meridian Color owners have been pretty pleased.

[+GammaPiSigma]

I am very happy with my Meri Colour. Yes the screen can be hard to see in direct sunlight and does washout a bit but it is magic in the car with the power adapter plugged in. I tend not to spend a lot of time staring at the screen so you can use the timer function to turn the backlight off after a short period of time. This is a useful function as the backlight does drain the batteries heavily.

 

The explorist screens are much better so if this is your main issue you should consider the explorist instead of the Meri Colour. Like anything else both units have their pluses and minuses.

 

Mike.

[+Kit Fox]

I own a Meridian Gold, and I bought my dad a Meridian Color. I love both units. For clarity and driving directions, the color unit, combined with Mapsend Directroute can't be beat. For geocaching, I prefer my Gold, combined with Mapsend Topo.

 

Yes the screen on the Meridian Color is a bit hard to see, when viewed in direct sunlight, but is amazing, in lower light conditions.

 

I like the Meridian Series GPS series because they withstand lots of abuse, and they have great memory storage capacity. They hold 500 waypoints in the internal memory. When combined with an SD card, the memory capability is asmuch as your card will hold.

 

I currently hold about 700 waypoints in my Merigold, separated by area, in case I want to go caching.

[Pinon]

I'm with you Kit Fox.....I love my Merigold.......

[+spearfox]

I use my wife's Meridian color frequently. As stated the screen can be hard hard to see in direct sun. We adapted to that quickly.

I have also used it for nightcaching where I have found that the backlight is too bright even at half illumination.

Those are about the only drawbacks. A big plus is the data connection and the memory card. I got my wife a 1 Gig memory card which can hold a TON of caches and tracks.

[+nefesh]

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.

[+embra]

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.

Minor point of fact: with my Meridian Platinum (and I think this was true across all Meridians that ran DirectRoute), when you create an autoroute, DR would hijack your settings for things like detail setting, map orientation, alarms etc. It would return your settings at route completion or if you stopped the route...unless you turned the unit off during the route. Then you were stuck with the settings, and would have to reset them manually.

 

The explorists seem better about putting things back the way things were, even if the unit is powered off and on in the middle of the route. Other aspects of DR are the same, as best I can recall, so I think the explorist gets the nod for being less buggy (though perhaps I'm overlooking something). They *are* lacking a few desired capabilities (e.g. waypoint projection) of the Meridians.