Sorry for the long rant, but more detail seemed the way to go. Almost wrote an article, but I'll stick with this for now. Had a long solo sesh on my boat this morning to think this one out, so you get ALL my thoughts while they're fresh.
I may have paid extra money to make my Livescope worse. Figured I’d share this here because even though most of you are primarily fly fishermen, I know there are enough boat/electronics/fishing nerds around here to appreciate it.
I’ve been running Garmin Livescope for about a year now, primarily for salmon trolling in the Columbia. A very different application with very different needs than bass fishing, which is what most things are designed around.
For me, Livescope has one very specific and very useful job: Show me my gear, and show me the bottom (including snags so I can pull up out of the way)
When I’m trolling salmon, I like being able to see the cannonball, flasher, lure, etc. behind the boat in real time. I can tell roughly where everything is running, whether the gear is doing what it’s supposed to do, and every once in a while you get to watch a fish come investigate it (sniff and refusal, typically). It sounds a little gimmicky until you get used to having it. Ok it's gimmicky, but it's fun. I won't even claim it helps me catch more fish.
I had an LVS34 and, for that particular job, it worked really damn well.
So naturally, because I am a consumer whore who apparently cannot leave perfectly functional equipment alone, I saw Garmin come out with the LVS44 and thought, “Well obviously I need that.” Newer number. More resolution. Wider field of view. Better target separation. Clearly more gooder. Certainly couldn't be worse.
But there was actually one very practical reason the LVS44 appealed to me too: it doesn’t require the separate GLS 10 black box. That was a pretty big deal for me because I move my Livescope setup back and forth between two boats. With the LVS34, that meant dragging around the transducer, display stuff, cables, and the GLS 10 box every time. The GLS 10 isn’t enormous, but once you’re constantly moving the whole setup between boats, it becomes one more cumbersome chunk of electronics to mount, power, unplug, move, and find a home for. I did come up with a carrying case for everything, but then that ended up being in the way on both boats.
The idea of getting rid of that extra box and simplifying the whole portable setup was honestly one of the bigger reasons I talked myself into the upgrade.
So: better specs and less crap to haul between boats? Take my money. I swapped the LVS34 out for the LVS44 expecting basically the same experience, except better and simpler.
Two trips out and that has not been my experience. AT ALL. At least for trolling salmon in the Columbia, the LVS44 feels like a pretty substantial downgrade. The first thing I noticed was how much noisier the picture seemed. There’s considerably more stuff on the screen. More little returns, more clutter, more general sonar nonsense floating around everywhere. And to be fair, some of that may technically be the LVS44 doing a better job. It may simply be resolving more things in the water that the LVS34 wasn’t showing.
The problem is that I don’t really want more information. I want my flasher. With the LVS34, my trolling gear generally showed up as a nice obvious target. I could glance at the screen and immediately tell where it was. The flasher especially gave a pretty strong return, which makes sense considering I’m dragging a decent-sized piece of reflective metal or plastic through the water.
With the LVS44, the gear seems dramatically harder to pick out from everything else. It’s there. Sometimes. When it feels like it.
But instead of glancing at the screen and immediately going, “Yep, there’s my gear,” I find myself staring at it trying to decide whether a particular return is my flasher, a fish, a chunk of debris, or some tiny organism Garmin has decided I absolutely need to know about. And when the water gets moving, or turbid, it gets worse. The Columbia obviously isn’t some crystal-clear bass lake. We’re trolling in current, prop wash, suspended sediment, biological junk, probably a few sunken boats/cars/appliances. The LVS44 seems very excited to tell me about all of it.
I’ve played with gain, noise rejection, color gain, color limit, range, depth range and assorted other settings. I can clean the image up, but there always seems to be a tradeoff where reducing the clutter also makes my lure/flasher return less useful which surprised me.
One of the advertised improvements with the LVS44 is the wider field of view. On paper, that sounds fantastic. But I’m starting to think that for my particular use, the wider beam may actually be part of the problem. I don’t need to see a giant chunk of the river. I’m not sweeping around trying to find suspended bass or identify a crappie sitting next to a stump.
I basically want a spotlight pointed behind the boat that tells me: HERE IS YOUR STUFF.
The LVS34 was really good at that. The LVS44 feels more like somebody turned all the lights on in a warehouse when all I really wanted was a flashlight.
About as clear of a shot as I got this morning:
Another thing I’ve noticed is that targets don’t seem to jump off the screen the same way. From what I’ve been able to find, other people comparing the two have noticed something similar. The LVS34 tends to make fish and lures look a little larger and more obvious, while the LVS44 may be rendering things closer to their actual proportional size.
Again, technically better. Practically, for me, worse. If my 11-inch flasher is being displayed at a more realistic proportional size, congratulations Garmin. Wonderful engineering achievement. Now, please make it look like a school bus again.
I don’t particularly care about sonar realism. I want to be able to identify my gear instantly while I’m driving the boat, watching rods, keeping track of depth, and avoiding other boats.
The LVS34 is better for what I do, so I just purchased ANOTHER LVS34 after selling my previous unit to a friend for a really good deal
I took a sonar system that worked extremely well for my particular type of fishing, spent a pile of money replacing the transducer with the shiny new model, eliminated one annoying black box from my boat-swapping routine, and may have successfully purchased worse sonar performance in the process.
Technology!
LVS44: Excellent if your goal is to see everything happening in the Columbia and carry one less black box.
LVS34: Excellent if your goal is to see the thing you’re actually fishing with.
If anyone is interested in a lightly used LVS44, I know of one hitting the used market
I may have paid extra money to make my Livescope worse. Figured I’d share this here because even though most of you are primarily fly fishermen, I know there are enough boat/electronics/fishing nerds around here to appreciate it.
I’ve been running Garmin Livescope for about a year now, primarily for salmon trolling in the Columbia. A very different application with very different needs than bass fishing, which is what most things are designed around.
For me, Livescope has one very specific and very useful job: Show me my gear, and show me the bottom (including snags so I can pull up out of the way)
When I’m trolling salmon, I like being able to see the cannonball, flasher, lure, etc. behind the boat in real time. I can tell roughly where everything is running, whether the gear is doing what it’s supposed to do, and every once in a while you get to watch a fish come investigate it (sniff and refusal, typically). It sounds a little gimmicky until you get used to having it. Ok it's gimmicky, but it's fun. I won't even claim it helps me catch more fish.
I had an LVS34 and, for that particular job, it worked really damn well.
So naturally, because I am a consumer whore who apparently cannot leave perfectly functional equipment alone, I saw Garmin come out with the LVS44 and thought, “Well obviously I need that.” Newer number. More resolution. Wider field of view. Better target separation. Clearly more gooder. Certainly couldn't be worse.
But there was actually one very practical reason the LVS44 appealed to me too: it doesn’t require the separate GLS 10 black box. That was a pretty big deal for me because I move my Livescope setup back and forth between two boats. With the LVS34, that meant dragging around the transducer, display stuff, cables, and the GLS 10 box every time. The GLS 10 isn’t enormous, but once you’re constantly moving the whole setup between boats, it becomes one more cumbersome chunk of electronics to mount, power, unplug, move, and find a home for. I did come up with a carrying case for everything, but then that ended up being in the way on both boats.
The idea of getting rid of that extra box and simplifying the whole portable setup was honestly one of the bigger reasons I talked myself into the upgrade.
So: better specs and less crap to haul between boats? Take my money. I swapped the LVS34 out for the LVS44 expecting basically the same experience, except better and simpler.
Two trips out and that has not been my experience. AT ALL. At least for trolling salmon in the Columbia, the LVS44 feels like a pretty substantial downgrade. The first thing I noticed was how much noisier the picture seemed. There’s considerably more stuff on the screen. More little returns, more clutter, more general sonar nonsense floating around everywhere. And to be fair, some of that may technically be the LVS44 doing a better job. It may simply be resolving more things in the water that the LVS34 wasn’t showing.
The problem is that I don’t really want more information. I want my flasher. With the LVS34, my trolling gear generally showed up as a nice obvious target. I could glance at the screen and immediately tell where it was. The flasher especially gave a pretty strong return, which makes sense considering I’m dragging a decent-sized piece of reflective metal or plastic through the water.
With the LVS44, the gear seems dramatically harder to pick out from everything else. It’s there. Sometimes. When it feels like it.
But instead of glancing at the screen and immediately going, “Yep, there’s my gear,” I find myself staring at it trying to decide whether a particular return is my flasher, a fish, a chunk of debris, or some tiny organism Garmin has decided I absolutely need to know about. And when the water gets moving, or turbid, it gets worse. The Columbia obviously isn’t some crystal-clear bass lake. We’re trolling in current, prop wash, suspended sediment, biological junk, probably a few sunken boats/cars/appliances. The LVS44 seems very excited to tell me about all of it.
I’ve played with gain, noise rejection, color gain, color limit, range, depth range and assorted other settings. I can clean the image up, but there always seems to be a tradeoff where reducing the clutter also makes my lure/flasher return less useful which surprised me.
One of the advertised improvements with the LVS44 is the wider field of view. On paper, that sounds fantastic. But I’m starting to think that for my particular use, the wider beam may actually be part of the problem. I don’t need to see a giant chunk of the river. I’m not sweeping around trying to find suspended bass or identify a crappie sitting next to a stump.
I basically want a spotlight pointed behind the boat that tells me: HERE IS YOUR STUFF.
The LVS34 was really good at that. The LVS44 feels more like somebody turned all the lights on in a warehouse when all I really wanted was a flashlight.
About as clear of a shot as I got this morning:
Another thing I’ve noticed is that targets don’t seem to jump off the screen the same way. From what I’ve been able to find, other people comparing the two have noticed something similar. The LVS34 tends to make fish and lures look a little larger and more obvious, while the LVS44 may be rendering things closer to their actual proportional size.
Again, technically better. Practically, for me, worse. If my 11-inch flasher is being displayed at a more realistic proportional size, congratulations Garmin. Wonderful engineering achievement. Now, please make it look like a school bus again.
I don’t particularly care about sonar realism. I want to be able to identify my gear instantly while I’m driving the boat, watching rods, keeping track of depth, and avoiding other boats.
The LVS34 is better for what I do, so I just purchased ANOTHER LVS34 after selling my previous unit to a friend for a really good deal
I took a sonar system that worked extremely well for my particular type of fishing, spent a pile of money replacing the transducer with the shiny new model, eliminated one annoying black box from my boat-swapping routine, and may have successfully purchased worse sonar performance in the process.
Technology!
LVS44: Excellent if your goal is to see everything happening in the Columbia and carry one less black box.
LVS34: Excellent if your goal is to see the thing you’re actually fishing with.
If anyone is interested in a lightly used LVS44, I know of one hitting the used market
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