Chosing the Right Lowrance to Buy?

[Nimbus]

I am in the market to but a GPS/Sonar graph, I have had the oppertunity to fish with a friend who bought one of the Hard drive large screen Lowrance models at cost of over 2K, I can't spend that kind of money but from my limited research on the Lowrance HSOforum it looks like I can get the same mapping/Sonar abilities with a smaller size screen unit. I have seen multiple posting about the LMS 332C, this would otherwise seem to be popular based on that alone. I fish lake Superior and other bigger inland lakes so I would probably lean towards one of the Dual Frequency units for the ability to track downrigger equip. my questions are as follows: with the dual freq transducers, does one or both of the frequency's suffer buy being combined in the same housing?

If I decide to buy some of the high defination Map chips(1-3) ft contours, does the non-hard drive models regenerate this detailed information quickly enough to be usefull?

it appears that screen size is the key factor in the large price diffrence in the Lowrance Models, is that right or am I missing something else?

any info or opinion would be great, I am putting a budget of 1K on the purchase and don't want to waste money on x-tra options I would not use.plug and play maps are about as sophisticated as I want to get, I don't care about recording or playback stuff other than marking waypoints.

Thanks Nimbus

[TSCTSC]

I have the LMS 332 C. I fish (Contact US Regarding This Word) and use it for Lake Michigan. I think I would highly recommend it. However, if you have more money, go ahead and buy the larger screen models so that when you split GPS and sonar screens, they still look rather large. Other than that...332C without hesitation.

[BIG DS]

All of your observations are correct. The dual freq. transducers work fine. There is no problems that I know of, and we have sold a bunch. The speed and accuracy of the plug and play maps are great. You will not have any complaints.