Mares ICON HD

Posted on Mar, 2010 in Home/News and Events/Mares ICON HD

This past weekend I made my way down to New Jersey for Beneath The Sea, an annual diving trade show where manufacturers show off their products, for someone like me who is a gear fanatic it was like being in heaven. A number of items caught my eye but a few stood out. The first being the Mares Icon HD computer. This dive computer is revolutionary to the diving world, it uses a high definition LCD screen, the same type of screen found on laptops, cell phones and even tvs.

The screen really is the first noticable piece on this computer, by using the lcd technology Mares has put a full color dive computer on the market. Yes thats right i said color, when i first took a look at this computer i was not sure what to think, but a few minutes later after talking to a mares customer service rep i was convinced this thing was the real deal.

He started by showing me the different menus and how to navigate through them. This helped deal with skepticism as i looked at this computer and saw 4 buttons, however after a quick tutorial i realized that this thing was as easy to navigate as other computers on the market. One button allows to go back, two buttons for up and down or left and right and one to select the menu icon. Another nice feature of the menus is that when you navigate through them is that you can see all of the different menus to choose from, this way you are not just surfing through the computer looking for the feature you want to change. Once in a select menu you then see all of the choices provided under that menu, once again you can just go down to the setting you wish to change and select the item you wish to change without having to go through other settings.

One of the newer features on the Icon HD is a compass built right into the computer. Now i will say this, I am skeptical of all computers that use a compass, some people can seem to get them to work great others not so well, we will have to wait and see if mares has provided us with a proper digital compass.

Another nice feature of this computer is that the screen is massive, throwing out tons of information for the diver to see such as a large ascent rate indicator, a top section with the no decompression time remaining and current depth. Other screens are available for the diver to look at include a graph of the dive profile and a map of the dive area if you have dove the area before, mares also has maps of many shipwrecks that can be put into the computer.

The last and final question is wireless air integration, currently the Icon HD does not offer the wireless air integration, it is coming soon though. If you purchase the Icon HD right now, when the air integration comes out you pay the difference between the air integrated and non air integrated and you recieve a transmitter and a brand new Icon HD, you only have to trade in the older model.

All in all i think Mares hit a home run with this computer. I have tried their computers before and found some to be almost impossible to work with, however this thing is nothing like it. Currently i am trying to get my hands on a demo unit so i can run it through its paces and see how it performs.

Here is a nice little site to show you some of the features on the Icon HD

Till Next Time

Alex

Related interesting posts:

Tags: air integration, beneath the sea, dive computer, lcd, Mares, mares icon hd, transmitter, wireless air integration

Comments are closed.