Lowrance X -4 Pro Fish Finder

"For the money you can't beat this unit. Pretty much operates itself although you can change the settings to manual if you like. It's small enough to mount up front and not be in the way. It's also nice that you can change the size of the "Depth", "Temp", and "Voltage" from large to small so it doesn't take up so much room on the screen. Just be careful Not to follow the directions to go back to factory default settings. I did and ended up having to call Lowrance thinking I'd fouled up the unit, turns out there was another method of resetting everything the manual doesn't show. Other than that it's a great unit!!

This review might be long winded but these things are just like GPS units and metal detectors in that it's hard to pin down how good one is compared to another, phrases like "Really good" or "better" are so vague and yet it would be nice to know if I can see a fish in the river with it, which in itself is kinda a vague request. How big a fish or how far away the fish is and what kind of water you're in all makes a difference to the answer. This is my first fishfinder so I'm as newbie as it gets with these things, but quite honestly it was an easy gadget to figure out, the display and setup are all intuitive and I pretty much had it figured out in under 5 minutes without reading this section in the book. The installation was also fairly straight foreward with no surprises, but it's worth skimming through before you do any drilling and mounting of this product. I chose thiis fishfinder based on the fact that I already had a GPS unit and therefore didn't want the complexity of having one built into my fishfinder as well as the fact that I was planning to hook it up onto a canoe for fishing and it had to be portable and have a low power drain, it also helped in that it was cheap and but not so much that it was the bottom line model that barely worked. I am a bit of a techie so I also can tell you that the frequencies that are used in these fish finders are actually important and the general rule of thumb is that the lower frequencies will tend to travel further and therefore allow for a deeper overall depth range such as what the 80khz frequency does, though this comes at the sacrifice of resolution, which simply means that on that frequency the detector can only pick up larger fish. Whereas the higher frequencies such as 200khz and beyond will not go as deep but they can pickup finer detail and of course smaller fish. The interesting thing is that there are a few detectors out there using some really high frequencies, mainly the Lowrance DSI models and what comes from that is the capabilities of being able to see under water structural forms quite well, this does come at the sacrifice of depth, which limits these machines to under 250ft. The other problem with those Fishfinders is that the detail is so sharp that the fish show up at true size on the fishfinder, which really is too small to be noticed. Why am I yaking about other detectors here? I had to evaluate what was available in order to pick what I wanted and more than likely you will be doing the same thing too, so this is just a download of my hunting finds, which maybe a few of you will find usefull, most will be annoyed though. Anyhow, I really only looked at the Lowrance detectors just to keep my hunt simple, I'm sure other companies make great fish finders too. One thing that I found confusing with Lowrance was the model naming process, but it roughly goes like this, the "X4" is the bottom model with only one frequency which means that it will do fine but for a few more dollars you can get the "X4 Pro" which really only has the extra frequency to help find smaller fish. The next step is the " Mark 4 DSI" which had those really high frequencies and therefore saw shipwrecks and structural steel pilings and such if you like that sort of thing. The next models in their arsenal has things like colour and built in GPS units, which I'm sure were fine but actually drained my battery supply faster than I wanted. The "Mark 5X" series are all about a better display and it's your call on whether it's worth the extra cash outlay. Since I was using this fishfinder on a canoe I did have to consider the power drain on my battery pack #12V# and nobody likes carrying extra weight in the form of too big of a battery so I found this model, the X4 Pro used 170ma of battery power each hour which means a good set of rechargeable AA batteries would last for 12 hours, whereas if I used the Lowrance models above this unit then the drain would double and thus I would need a bigger battery source, which some might except for the extra bells and whistles. I tend to sometimes fish a fairly fast river once in a while so I have a small old 2 stroke outboard mounted on my canoe which surprisingly effected my fishfinder with electrical interferance in the form of showing more fish on the finder than there really was. I found this out when I turned the motor off and on several times in a 5 minute period, but I can't really blame Lowrance for that, it may be the old motor with it's out of date electrics. So in general I am pleased with this fishfinder and would recommend it. Just a note, I didn't go for the portable X4 model because I'm not a big fan of "D" cells and I already had my own ideas on mounting the transponder to my existing motor mount.