14 out of 14 people found this review helpful.
My new favorite handheld GPS this one is awesome.
Date of Review: Jul 10, 2004
The Bottom Line: If you need a handheld GPS this is the one. Color is great. Routing and mapping very useful.
Garmin has done it. Given us color, what a difference. A ton of memory 115mb, 5x the 76S. It's more expensive but worth it color is great for maps. Memory allows much more flexibility for loading maps. You can't go wrong with this unit. Garmin has put out a great product. You though the 76S was good it is now time to upgrade to the 76CS and experience color maps. WOW!
I bought mine at Scuba Steve's Marine Outlet http://www.scubasteve.biz based on Epinions in the 76S reviews. I spoke with "Scuba Steve" (Neil) he was great to work with answered my questions and was very pleasant. He was very helpful in my decision to buy the 76CS over the 76C or 76S explaining the differences in features. On top of that he had prices that will be hard to beat. Very prompt and professional shipping at www.scubasteve.biz He runs a small home based business I learned from chatting with him.
Thanks Neil "Scuba Steve" for your help in my GPS purchase.
I wanted to expand on this a bit now that I've used it for a while. Hopefully it will make the review a bit more useful to everyone.
Battery life is excellent, Garmin's 20 hour life is accurate for this unit I have gotten at least that on my first set of batteries. This is better than my first Garmin handheld the black and white Garmin (76S) which is a great product as well if you can't afford the extra for color. It doesn't have the memory or routing the color models do.
The accuracy for me inside my car with no external antenna is within 15-19 feet consistently.
I love the auto routing with the North America City Select CD, it is great for finding my way to addresses I have not been to before in parts of the city or state I don't know well. I no longer ask for directions just the address and plug it in to the GPS and go. Also you have a couple different ways to set up the way it gives you directions. You can have it give you the fastest way and also the shortest in mileage. If you turn off course after a few seconds of being off course it will recalcuate you directions to your destination automatically based on your new direction of travel. Very cool.
The ability to pull up the nearby gas stations, restaurants, points of interest, etc. is great. The only thing I don't like is in the points of interest it seems to include all the churchs which clutters things up (there are a lot of churchs I never realized how many). Not that I don't like churchs but I only need to visit mine not every one in the surrounding area :) It would be nice to be able to filter some types of points out of the list.
The expanded memory of 115mb is great. I can now get basically everything loaded at once that I need. I have all of Florida's road system loaded, the I-75 coridor to Atlanta, city of Houston and Portland, OR, and my Gulf of Mexico bluecharts loaded onto the unit at once. I couldn't do this on the 76S. Also loading maps is so so so much faster with the USB interface. This has got to be one of the best upgrades it only takes a few minutes now to load maps much quicker than the serial bus interface on the older units.
When you are buy your GPS make sure you don't overlook the accessories. You will want a case to protect it and the cigarette lighter adapter (saves on batteries in the car). Also don't forget mounts especially for the car. I don't think most people will need an external antenna I have no problem receiving a signal when on my dash.
The more I use it the more I like it. I still haven't played with every feature.
I'm very happy with the unit and the e-tailer I bought it from between the units quality and usefulness and Scuba Steve's (www.scubasteve.biz) service I am a very satisfied Garmin customer.
