Jesper Weissglas has put together a clever web page that allows you to view sample raster and vector chart renderings produced by many of the major chartplotter and navigation software products, including Active Captain, Rose Point Coastal Explorer, Expedition, Fugawi, Garmin, MacENC, Nobeltec VNC, OpenCPN, PolarNavy, Tiki Navigator, and TimeZero.
I’ll let Mr. Weissglas explain what he’s done, and why:
Features of charting programs are discussed a lot. But chart graphics quality is often overlooked. This page attempts to fix this.
Only unscaled screenshots and lossless file formats have been used. I have attempted to get the same area covered, but all programs differ in how they treat zoom and scaling, and the screenshots have been made by different people. So the shots are not identical.
I am not affiliated with any of these companies. I am a Swedish boat designer who is very picky about the visual appearance of my charts.
If you’re in the market, or just and interested observer, time spent on this site is very much worthwhile!
