We pointed the 10 chartplotters south on a cold, sunny winter's day to check the glare factor.

We last covered color GPS chartplotters in the February 15, 2000 issue, almost an eon ago in the world of marine electronics. In that evaluation, the Si-Tex Nautilus was the Best Buy, and the Simrad Shipmate CE40 was our pick at the top of the line at $6,500.

As we noted even then, the basics of any GPS receiver—its ability to acquire and track satellites, and to perform accurately the trigonometric gymnastics that give us such functions as real-time position, course over the ground, course to steer, cross-track error, estimated time of arrival, and so on—can pretty much be taken for granted these days. We haven't encountered any GPS device in…