Garmin Etrex Legend GPS Receiver
by Garmin
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List Price: Our Price: $149.99 You Save: $50.00 (25%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $72.99 (click here) Category: GPS or Navigation System See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Garmin Etrex Legend GPS Receiver
Customer Review: Better than expected
Summary: 5 Stars
Bottom line: I love this gadget. Even though I had downloaded and skimmed through the documentation before buying it, I was surprised at how well it worked and at all the optional features it had. First, about the basic GPS features: It works great, locks onto satellites quickly and shows your position in a matter of seconds. The amount of map detail was surprising?"It doesn??t just have the main Interstate highways, but also all the major surface streets. And that??s not just for the USA, but Canada, Mexico and obscure towns in South America too. And although it??s not advertised, the built-in map has country outlines and major cities for Europe, Asia and Africa as well.
About the only disappointment I had in this department was that although the map had a lot of detail for the streets around my part of Atlanta, the Chattahoochee River was completely missing. However, the map does show the Mississippi flowing through St. Louis, so at least some rivers are present.
I found the usability to be excellent. With just five buttons and a joystick, it??s very easy to find your way around all the features and drill down into the various menus and options. The joystick is a brilliant idea, and I found I could work the main functions while holding the unit in my left hand and jogging.
My major overall disappointment was with the software integration on my laptop. As noted elsewhere on Amazon.com, DeLorme??s Street Atlas software has an abominable user interface, so I hoped this GPS device would work well with Microsoft??s Streets & Trips 2003. Alas, that was not the case. The only thing Streets and Trips shows is a little car icon on the map showing your position, and that??s not even real time?"it only updates every 15 seconds. That may not sound like a long time, but when you??re trying to make a decision at a confusing intersection, it can matter. Streets & Trips doesn??t even show ??bread crumbs,? the trail on the map of where the GPS devices knows it??s been.
Although DeLorme??s Street Atlas is almost unusable due to the bizarre user interface, its integration with GPS devices is much better. The GPS updates the map position in real time, so you can actually see yourself moving down the highway, instead of having the jerky jumps that Microsoft Streets & Trips displays. Also, Delorme will talk to you and tell you when to turn to keep on your route, and it accepts voice input commands as well. So I keep a current version of each software package on my laptop, using Microsoft Streets & Trips for its ease of use in basic mapping and routing functions, and Street Atlas for GPS purposes while in the car.
So in summary, the eTrex Legend generally functions very well, is easy to use, and provides a lot of capability for the price.
Customer Review: My first GPS
Summary: 4 Stars
I have never owned a GPS unit before. I gave this one to myself for Christmas. I also bought the cigarette lighter DC cable (a huge plus for long car trips) and the case (not absolutely necessary, but handy). As a neophyte to this whole business, I have nothing against which to compare the Garmin eTrex Legend. I chose it because there was a [$$$] rebate on it at the time, otherwise I was going to get the eTrex Venture. I am glad for the upgrade as this unit has 8MB of memory for map uploading.
I am still discovering things about the unit, and its sophistication and flexibility astound me. I think that these units are as useful and will become as common as cell phones, either in automobiles or on one's person. I recently had to go to Florida (I am from California) and it saved me half-a-dozen times from making wrong turns and creating a lot of frustration and lost time. Florida is flat and I am completely lost there as I do not know East from West nor North from South. I think that there is no directional instinct present in the higher primates. Or I am simply deficient in that area. Either way, the Etrex Legend was the most useful item I had with me (I had no cell phone).
This unit is WAAS enabled which means it can be accurate down to a three meter circle. I learned how to mark a route from the place I was staying to my mother's house. Once I had that route in place, there was no way I could go wrong. On the navigation screen the large course pointer would actually "break" and point when I came to a turn I was supposed to make. If you use the "Track" feature, the unit automatically creates Waypoints along a sort of breadcrumb trail. You can reverse the track and go in the opposite direction.
My only complaint is that you must use only Garmin Mapsource maps and each time you upload a new map the old one is automatically erased (don't be alarmed, however, because the basemap that comes installed with the unit is NEVER erased. Only the user-uploaded maps are erased during the procedure). Nonetheless, given the memory in the unit it would be nice if you could upload several different maps at a time and not lose the previously uploaded data. And the Mapsource maps leave something to be desired in their detail. For instance most of the street names in my hometown are not on the Mapsource map even though the streets themselves are there. But this is a minor quibble because in the end what you are really doing is going from one latitude/longitude position to another, and you can put in the names of streets in the form of Waypoints if you so choose.
Considering the [$$$] rebate I got from Garmin for this unit this thing is a steal. Anywhere around [$$$] is a pretty fair price for something so useful and so much fun.
Customer Review: Very good GPS receiver. Could be better (for a price).
Summary: 4 Stars
You can see other positive reviews of the etrex Legend here, so I won't rehash them. The short story is that the Legend is a pretty decent GPS unit that works pretty well.The base map included in the Legend only shows major highways and major streets. This is similar to the maps you get from a car rental agency. It's perfectly fine for doing rough navigation from city to city. At first, I tried using Rand McNally's StreetFinder and TripMaker Deluxe on my laptop with the Legend. The setup worked, but having to deal with the serial cable and using a laptop in the car was not very practical.
After I've had my Legend a while, I had a chance to borrow and use a Vista. The owner of the Vista upgraded it with detailed street-detail maps from Garmin's MapSource "Metroguide USA" CD .... The detailed street map is a really nice feature -- especially because you can look up addresses. Having such a detailed map in a small portable device is a delight! I decided to get the Metroguide for myself.
From my usage comparison, I found two things missing in the Legend compared to the top-end etrex Vista.
First, the Legend has only 8 MB of expansion memory instead of the 24 MB in the Vista. This turns out to be a big issue for me, as I would like to have a complete metro guide of the greater Los Angeles area. With 8 MB, I could only fit 6 of the 18 MetroGuide map sets that I would have liked. This means, I am missing coverage of a large section stretching roughly from Compton to Long Beach to Lynwood to Cerritos to Irvine that I would have wanted. In contrast, the Vista held all of greater Los Angeles area, plus some San Francisco, San Diego, and Las Vegas.
Second, the Vista has sensors for barometric altitude and magnetic compass heading. The Legend estimates altitude via GPS, and calculated heading based on your travel speed vector. If you are a trail-hiker, these sensors improve your navigation.
Used as-is from the factory (i.e., only the American basemaps), the Legend is perfectly fine, and I was quite happy with it.
I could live without the Vista's sensors;
But, having hit the 8 MB memory limit (trying to load Los Angeles), I would definitely go with the Vista now.
The Metroguide maps sizes of other cities may or may not be an issue for you. Go to the Garmin website and use their MapSourec Map Viewer and count the number of "yellow squares" you'll need to cover you area of interest. Each square roughly represents between 500K to 1.5 MB of data (with the smaller, "dense" squares being toward the 1 MB to 1.5MB size). You'll find that most of the big cities will have enough squares to easily exceed the 8 MB of the Legend.
Customer Review: Flexible Value - For the Frugal, Not the Cheap
Summary: 5 Stars
This unit provides a good balance between features and price. It is of a convenient size, has an easy to learn interface, and works as advertised.
While not intended to provide address-to-address navigation, the built-in Americas Highways base map provides decent background mapping given its 2MB dataset size and coarse scale. In my locale, all of the major roads that I would care to see are displayed. Large scale detailed streets data are available from Garmin if you need it.
The intuitive interface allows a person to easily explore this unit's capabilities. The built-in trip computer has allowed me a glimpse of the grim reality of how much of drive home is spent literally sitting (stopped) in traffic, even though most of my route is on the Interstate. I also appreciate the relatively large number of tracking log points that the 8MB of internal memory affords.
The NMEA-0183 Interface Standard governs communications between marine navigation equipment via a serial data bus, thus, as would be expected, the included PC interface cable is serial. That said, computer connectivity has worked predictably and reliably, showing me exactly where I am at in Microsoft Streets and Trips on the PC. It's true that my Mac's lack of a serial port prohibits a connection without purchasing a third party adapter, but the reality is that there isn't much great mapping software currently available for this platform (Keyspan is available for about 40USD and is compatible with PC and Mac). The other reality is that my primary purpose for this unit is not as an antenna for mapping software.
While the included compass requires movement to determine bearing and the altitude is inherently not as accurate as lateral position, these shortcomings may not be all that important to the average user. A true electronic compass and a barometric altimeter are available on two other eTrex models. For a small premium, the Summit trades a few of the Legend's features (base map and some utilities) for these two items. For a larger premium, the Vista adds these two items to the full list of Legend features.
If you are looking for something so that you can simply say that you have a GPS unit, look at the standard yellow eTrex or the eTrex Camo for a few dollars more. If you are not a full-on surveyor, but serious about mapping using a GPS as an external antenna for your computer, consider something like the Trimble Pathfinder Pocket (note: this pricier unit uses the serial standard and requires a PC or PocketPC).
Customer Review: Lousy Product For Automobile Navigation
Summary: 1 Stars
The Etrex Legend appears to have been designed by engineers without user feedback. Operation is counterintuitive. Processing speed is slow. It is virtually worthless for automobile navigation without the optional MapSource data--and this data is so ancient the street where I live isn't even included. My street was constructed nine years ago!If you like to read operation manuals, you'll enjoy this product because the controls are truly bizarre. You'll find, for example, that a single button serves as both the on-off switch and the backlight switch. Buttons with up and down arrows don't let you scroll through the tiny-hard-to-read menus--these button are used to zoom-in and zoom-out on the map page and adjust the screen contrast on the satellite page. Dual function buttons are a hallmark of this product. A button marked with a magnifying glass icon has nothing to do with zooming! The controls are simply counterintuitive. You will need to read the manual just to learn how to turn-off the unit. I'm sorry Garmin, but it shouldn't be that complicated.
Processing speed is slow. It seems to take forever to locate enough satellites to navigate. When I transferred MapSource data to the unit, that took a whopping 1 hr. 47 minutes.
The highway and street information packaged with the Etrex Legend contains only major highways. The roads it included in this area were limited to 4-lane highways.
I had to purchase the MapSource data just to make the Etrex Legend at all useable for automobile navigation. The MapSource product is not inexpensive, and it sucks. As noted earlier, it does not even include the street where I live and this road was constructed nine years ago. In my local area, it lists maybe 1 of 5 gas stations and about 1 of 10 restaurants. MapSource is a shoddy product that Garmin should be ashamed to put their name on. It's a real rip-off.
The Etrex Legend might be able to let boaters locate a harbor or help a hiker return to his starting point, but it's a real bust for automobile navigation. And no matter what the application, the unusual controls and hard-to-read screen are challenging. I received this GPS receiver as a gift. Frankly, it's going in a drawer and I'm going to buy another product. And definitely not anything from Garmin.