Garmin Oregon 300

[eyeQue]

This will be an ongoing posting as more screenshots are available.

Inbuilt Screenshots of the Unit Screen

The most recent Software update:-



OPTIONS - A selection of screenshots of the many options in the unit.
The Black background of the screenshots, is my own, and has replaced the default Garmin backgrounds.

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CityNavigator Europe v2008

With the OPTIONS
[a]Without Shaded Relief ..........................[b]With Shaded Relief

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CityNavigator Europe v2008

With the OPTIONS
[a]With Garmin Map POIs .......................[b]With my Waypoints and Speed Camera Data

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Garmin TOPO GB v2


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Pocket GPSWorld Zoned Database


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The most important are the mobiles [Black]
The less important are the pmobiles [Blue]
The specs are in yellow.
Gatso are as downloaded
They are 24x24.


Pocket GPSWorld Database - Visual and Audible warnings


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Initial Warning Proximity.....................................Overspeed warning



Two Visual Overspeed Warning [Icon and Red Alert] with audible beeps



Pocket GPSWorld Zoned Database - My New Icons





Pocket GPSWorld Database - Wired's GPSR Overlay

I just tried this! It gives no Audible warning but it does keep your POI Categories down.

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Garmin Oregon 300 + Garmin iQue 3600
My Zoned Speed Camera Icons, available here.

[eyeQue]

Just installed Garmin Discoverer!!
I have been waiting for months and now:-

Very poor standards on the Oregon.
On inserting the Micro SD card the unit installed Software 2.70 when I had already had 2.80. I had to re-instal 2.80.

The Brecon and Pembrokeshire National Parks was my selection. Other regions may have better results. The quality of the 'in-built' screenshot facility is good so it gives an accurate record of what is on my unit.

What the unit shows!!

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Slightly better views.

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Edited re trouble with Image Shack
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Garmin Oregon 300 + Garmin iQue 3600
My Zoned Speed Camera Icons, available here.

[eyeQue]

Notice in the following screenshots how the roads are duplicated [in each case there is only one road but two are shown in different colours]:-

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Notice how blurred these two screenshots are:-

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Basically, the only views that justify the use of Discoverer on an Oregon in this area of the UK are:-
300ft
500ft
800ft - with double roads
0.2miles - with double roads
1.2miles
2miles
5miles

The best for walking the local Coast Path would be 300 + 500ft.

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_________________
Garmin Oregon 300 + Garmin iQue 3600
My Zoned Speed Camera Icons, available here.

[philpugh]

Thanks for this eyeQue.

It does look very disappointing, esp for the money you have to pay.

The blurring is probably being caused by having a single scale bitmap but the duplicate roads is just plain silly. Can you turn off other layers (i.e. the OSGB road maps and the vector based navigation layer)? Or are these duplicates on the same layer?

At the useable zoom levels you aren't getting much of a view for navigation purposes.

Hmm... let's see how they develop this - but they need to take a look at how Memorymap or OziExplorer handle scalar map displays.

Edited:-

Just noticed you have City Navigator enabled also - try turning this off and one of the sets of roads should disappear! Shows you how far off the vector mapped roads are !
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Phil

[eyeQue]

I tried turning off all basemaps and CityNavigator but the result is the same.
There are no choices within Discoverer to select one of the four scaled maps.
The double roads is totally off-putting in line with their advert to have auto-navigation for the UK.

I have also tried all OPTIONS suggested by the US forum members that I 'rate' as experts. It could be a problem with my region only!

I have been waiting for feedback from Garmin UK in reply to three phonecalls and an email with the screenshots attached, but no feedback in almost 48 hours
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Garmin Oregon 300 + Garmin iQue 3600
My Zoned Speed Camera Icons, available here.

[eyeQue]

Just had a reply from Garmin UK.

[philpugh]

I see what you mean.

To be fair - their web site screen shots do appear to be genuine (rather than created) captures.

Maybe it is a fault with your region - could you take it back to where you bought it and try another region for comparison?
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Phil

[eyeQue]

Just received a call from Garmin UK.
The screenshots were seen and were the same for them! He could nothing to improve them, so it is not my unit or software.
I could not understand how the quality was so good on the Oregon on the Garmin Website?
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Garmin Oregon 300 + Garmin iQue 3600
My Zoned Speed Camera Icons, available here.

[mikealder]

Do the maps appear as poor quality on the device while in use or is the screen shot degrading the image quality?
If they look OK on the device a decent digital camera could yield better images if taken carefully - Mike

[eyeQue]

Mike,
The maps appear poor quality on the unit and the screenshot facility enhances the view.
Garmin staff said their units have the same view as my screenshots!

Took up your suggestion:-
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My attempt with the digital camera on the right.
The problem seems to the four map overlays in the SD card plus NavTech's road autorouting map creating duplicate roads.
_________________
Garmin Oregon 300 + Garmin iQue 3600
My Zoned Speed Camera Icons, available here.

[mikealder]

Do you know if the map is also switching the scale when zooming in/ out as some of the pictures seem to be 50K scale OS maps but the last two are 25K scale I think due to the level of detail - I only have 50K scale OS maps for that specific area and the map looks very different in detail.

If it is 25K scale you need to be zoomed in to a close up view in order to see the detail, the same principle applies to some of the hardware from other manufacturers when running 25K scale maps as there is too much information displayed when you zoom out which clutters the display - Mike

[eyeQue]

Having spent hours trying to find a way around these ‘blurry’ views I have now noticed that I bought the software with these criteria:-

Each card contains :
• 1:25,000 and 1:50,000 OS mapping for the area selected
• 1:250,000 and 1: 1,100,000 GB basemaps
• Full Navteq Road Network / Address Database / POI Database for all of GB
• Turn by Turn navigation (signed not audio) + POI navigation

I can actually see all four maps at the different zoom levels and I think these are causing overlap problems/conflicts!



What I now see on Garmin’s website that they only mention:-

Each card contains 1:250,000 scale routable data for the whole country for turn-by-turn directions to your chosen destination. Once there, your 1:25,000 scale OS Explorer Map helps you explore the trails, roads and rights of way, with rich landscape detail and a variety of destinations. The mapping is fully searchable, meaning you can search for and follow routes to your choice of facilities and attractions.

Have they removed the 1:50,000 + 1,100,000 maps because they were causing problems???

I cannot get any views to match Garmin's!
Our friends across the 'pond' think the Garmin screenshots are fake as Garmin UK say they get the same as me!
Their screenshots on their adverts do not have double roads or the autorouting detail.
When you get to the 1:25,000 detail, do you need auto routing?



http://www.garmin.com/garmin/cms/site/uk/c...B1D7B85DD8FEFDB



All four mapping levels are evident in the next screenshots as well as the autorouting software[grey road overlay on the image #1 #2].

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1:25,000 is in use in 200ft [very blurred], 300ft, and 500ft.

The results of these improved screenshots comes after manipulating the Options and other mapping software.
_________________
Garmin Oregon 300 + Garmin iQue 3600
My Zoned Speed Camera Icons, available here.

[rothers]

Great info, thanks for posting it.

Whilst the double roads are a problem my main concern with your screenshots is the extremely poor quality of the OS mapping. At first I thought it was that Garmin had got the scaling wrong so the pixels were interpolated, not 1:1, however this does not appear to be the case.

Below is the same 1:50k region, zoomed to 1:1 and extracted from Memory Map then cropped to 240x400. As you can see the coverage is exactly the same so no need to start interpolating. This is the same quality I would get on my RA7000.



How much internal memory does the Oregon 300 have ?

I think Garmin have applied some extreme lossy compression to their OS bitmaps to reduce size, that's why they are so poor at all zoom levels.

[eyeQue]

rothers,
Thank you for that photo. I think we all expected that quality when we bought Discoverer!

The Internal Memory is 900MB approx.
The unit comes with an internal world basemap so leaving 800MB approx.

As the Discoverer software came on a micro SD card [400MB for all the maps] I had to reload CityNavigator UK onto Internal memory and that still gives me 552MB free at the moment.

It is pretty obvious now that Garmin's screenshots are not actual screenshots because there is no overlay of the CityNavigator autorouting software by NavTech.

The road in your photo and Garmin's are yellow, whereas on the unit and in my screenshots, they have the secondary grey road.
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Garmin Oregon 300 + Garmin iQue 3600
My Zoned Speed Camera Icons, available here.

[eyeQue]

Some screenshots at 120ft and 200ft Zoom!

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Edited Sunday 11th due to Image Shack Problems.
_________________
Garmin Oregon 300 + Garmin iQue 3600
My Zoned Speed Camera Icons, available here.

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