Relying on a powerboat to cover more ground quickly for our testing, we compared four cartography cards. The Garmin BlueChart, loaded in the Garmin 3010C (top left); the Navionics Platinum, in a Raymarine E120 (top center); the C-Map NT+ Max, in a Standard Horizon CP-1000C (top right); and Navionics Gold, in the Northstar 6000i (flush mounted in console, lower right).

In addition to providing finely detailed charts for display on screen, today’s cards supply a plethora of additional information that mariners find extremely useful. A few years ago, we might have told buyers to look first at what plotter they liked and then live with the cards it came with. After all, they were all pretty much the same. Not today. The latest releases from

C-Map and Navionics have so much additional information that it takes a chartplotter with a very powerful processor and a high-resolution screen to fully exploit all of the cards’ capabilities. Today, picking your chart card is just as important as picking the plotter that will…