Garmin's Oregon 400t GPS review...
I had the opportunity to play with a Garmin Oregon 400t for a couple of weeks over the holidays. I really didn't use it on any hikes but did use it on a back country Jeep trip to help me navigate across some hard to follow desert trails. Over more than a decade I’ve used scads of different GPS models from a GPS 12 through to Rinos to Nuvis and I was a little bit fired up to see a hiking model with a larger color screen and decent topo maps built in. Obviously, if you are planning to use an Oregon only on foot, you will find some of my observations are much more relevant than others….
On the plus side, once I had put a route into the Oregon and activated it, anybody could follow it and stay on a trail. One guy I was with said it was like following a comic book. The downside is that even with the built in topo map and some add-on software, planning routes is still best done with outside software (for example DeLorme, All Topo or Terrain Navigator) and then downloaded to the Oregon. Mostly this unit functions just like any other color Garmin GPS.
On the negative side – beyond it’s cost relative to other GPS units -- I found the Oregon 400t to fall a bit short of my expectations and found it to also have some irritating quirks associated with its touch screen and user interface. While the included and add-on topographical maps are nice, I didn’t really find them particularly useful. The maps don’t really help when you are following a route and they are hard to use as one would a map. They add some context to your location on the screen when you zoom out but really, it seems like overkill to me. After some use, to me the color screen is much nicer to have than the topo maps.
The first thing I noticed when turning on the unit is that Garmin, which has used evolutions of the same sort of user interface for everything from GPS 12s, 38s IIIs, Vs, eTrexs and Rinos has gone to something different. It’s similar to how I remember the newer eTrex menus but with even more changes. You can still do everything you could before but now some choices are under different menu locations. For a first time GPS user, these are probably better but some are just silly. For me, it caused some additional getting used to. For example, you can’t activate a ‘Route’ form the Route area. You have to use the “Go To” area. Another example is when saving a waypoint with a name you want requires you to save the waypoint and then go to the waypoint menu and rename it. Previous generations let you name it when and where you created it.
Below are some of the irritants and positives I noticed in detail.
The thing that really makes the Oregon different is the touch screen.
This is a nice feature if only because it allows for a much larger screen on a unit that is not really any bigger than other GPS models designed for hikers. Overall the screen worked well but I did have some reservations:
1) Brightness - I’ve read some complaints elsewhere that the screen isn’t bright enough. When I was first familiarizing myself with the unit inside my house, the dim screen light gave me a headache. The main and setup menus had no place for adjusting the brightness so I suffered. Then came a brief flip through the manual. It reveals the brightness is adjusted from the power button. After turning the brightness up from the default setting it worked well. Outside on a sunny day, it will work – sometimes it works better with the light turned off. But for indoor use while programming and for inside a Jeep, it was easily bright enough.
2) Precision - Using the touch screen, I found it kinda hard to get the screen pointer located exactly where I wanted it on a map. In my opinion, this is where Garmin’s interface is lacking. If you want to scroll to a map location away from your current location so that you can lay out a route, it’s kind of a pain. And eventually, you will accidentially ‘tap’ the screen instead of sweeping your finger across it and a graphic ‘pushpin’ will appear on the screen over the map. Ideally you are supposed to use this pin to either set a way point or gather information about the area under the pin. And this is where things get tricky. Sometimes the pin moves, sometimes the map moves and the pin stays still. So if you want to do something like get the pin over the trail to mark a waypoint, it takes some trial and error – which is a waste of time. If you weren’t ready for the pushpin yet, tough. The only way to get rid of the pushpin is to back out all the way to the base map showing your current location and then start sweeping the screen again to get back to where you want to see the map. I ended up using outside software to create routes and then downloaded them to the Oregon. Using outside software is still about 500 times easier than trying to do it just using the unit.
3) Background – The wallpaper or background of the menu screens is changeable by the user but I found every option irritating. They were all busy and made the menu choices just a little harder to read. I would have loved a plain wallpaper.
4) Other Display Issues – As big as the screen is compared to other units, I still found it too small to really be useful as a map except perhaps in an emergency. To find your location required constant zooming in and out. It is also quite irriating to have roads or trails disapear from the display once you zoom out past a certain point (a problem common to all GPS units I’ve used). This is probably less of a problem when hiking and you are only going to cover 10 or so miles in a day. For a cross-country Jeep trip, I found it made using the unit (for route planning) very tedious.
Beyond the screen, I have some other thoughts on the unit’s interface and mapping software:
Maps -- According to Garmin the included map is roughly equivalent to USGS 100K maps. The unit I had also included the US TOPO 24K (AZ and NM) added using a MicroSD which is supposed to be the equivalent of USGS 1:24000 quadrangles. This map add-on is supposed to allow the 400t to be 'routeable' over trails as well. “Routable” here means the unit can quickly calculate a route for you from one point to another over roads or trails. The included map is NOT routeable. It will connect waypoints only with a straight line regardless of the road or trail network. For those of you that use outside software to create routes with waypoints at every key turn, this may not change much. But the add-on will supposedly let the GPS pick a route over trails much as a car GPS does.
To me, this additional map didn't seem to work well. First, trails -- technically county roads that are little more than double dirt tracks -- in the desert west of me in New Mexico don't become visible until you have zoomed down to the .3-mile setting (with 'normal' detail selected) or the 2-mile setting (with the 'most' detail selected). This leaves only a few miles of the road visible -- making repeated map scrolling necessary to find out where any road might lead (these roads are not anything close to straight). Also, with the detail setting set to high, the screen is painfully slow to redraw. If you are on foot, seeing only a few miles of road or trail might be okay but if you are traveling across the desert by vehicle and trying to plan a route, it takes a long time to figure out where that road or trail you are looking at might end up. This is especially true out here where a road that starts out one direction will probably not head in the direction for long. None of this really matters if you already have outside topo software but for the price of the unit, I expected it to be much easier to use. Note that the Oregon doesn’t come with any PC software.
Additionally, using every setting I could think of, I couldn't get this unit to create routes using roads in New Mexico. Garmin later told me this is because I wasn't within the routable area (New Mexico) when I was trying create a route in the routeable area (I was in Texas). But to me, I should be able to plan routes in advance using the trail or road network. When I finally took the unit to New Mexico, it still wouldn’t create routes over the county roads. Garmin told me that not all roads and trails are routable but didn’t respond as to how someone could tell which were routeable and which weren’t. So I could see a road on a map but not neccesarily create an automatic route on it.
On the plus side, I acutally found the included 100K map to be fairly useful. The difference between the two maps was only apparent when the detail was set to max and the 24K didn’t really provide that much more info. Where I was going the 100K USGS maps lack a lot of trail detail that is found only on the more detailed quadrangle. However, from what I could tell, the Garmin 100K had all the trails that were on the USGS quadrangles. This probably varies greatly by location.
Software Compatibility – I use Maptech’s Terrain Navigator Pro v.7 to plan and plot trips. I had to download new drivers (expected) and then found I couldn’t use the Oregon to interface directly with this software. To do this, I would have had to buy an upgrade for the software ($100) and then still use a beta version of more software drivers. If you are thinking of getting a newer GPS, be vary fastidious in checking the compatibilty of your current software. Ultimately, I could move data on and off the Oregon by using it as a flash drive but this takes more steps and some information is lost (like longer route and waypoint names). I also suspect this cuased a….
System crash – At one point, I had a system crash. All the the saved routes disapeared. I don’t know if this was because of the method I was using to move routes on to the Oregon or the system is just a bit unstable. Removing and reinstalling the batteries restored the lost info.
Personalization -- The Oregon’s menus are marginally customizable. You can save profiles that will keep certain settings such as using WAAS, routing prefrences and the location of main menu choices. Sadly, you couldn’t hide some main choices totally and you couldn’t change any of the sub menus. For example, I have no need of the best hunting/fishing feature, geocaching features or the sunset/sunrise clock but I can’t hide them. Also, moving around the main menu choices was a silly process. Moving an icon from the front to the back might take you 10 minutes since you can only move something one place at a time and that takes more than one step.
The setup menu -- which has seemingly dozens of never or infrequently used settings -- is not customizable. It takes many inputs to change the unit’s routing preferences or reset the track log -- something I do often. Garmin has decided other things that I will probably rarely use belong on the first page of the setup menu.
So, overall, I'd say it's a pretty neat gadget but it has lots of features that you can't really use as well as you should be able to and the cost for those features is still pretty high. It could also be improved quite a bit with better software and better routing capabilities.
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-- David.
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