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Poor documentation impairs usefulness
I've had good luck with Garmin automobile navigators for years, so I purchased a Garmin Oregon 450 for outdoor use. My contemplated use is in the Peruvian Amazon, and after two weeks of experimenting with the Oregon, I'm an unsatisfied owner. An automobile navigator is a no-brainer, but an outdoor navigator is altogether more complex, and the Garmin documentation and instructions for use of this unit's features are nearly non-existent, as other reviewers have said. The unit comes with a superficial you-print-it-yourself owner's manual, and Garmin's website "Training Videos" average one (1) minute each in length, and are equally superficial. There are only about six of them. The other website documentation for this unit is seemingly confined to selling the unit, not telling a new purchaser how to use it. I was caught in a vegetation "trap" last year in the Amazon and couldn't find my way back out, which led to a more-than-interesting night in a canoe in the jungle. I wanted a "course back" (which I think Garmin calls "TracBack") feature, so I could follow my own trail back through the water (where there are no paths to follow) so as to retrace my course back out of another trap. This involves laying down a "course" or "track" which you can follow backwards, and then not deviating from it. The "Compass" on the Oregon has a "Course Deviation Indicator," which would seem ideal for this purpose, however Garmin has no instructions about how to use it, and it is definitely not intuitive. Mine doesn't work at all like the Owner's Manual suggests it should, and the documentation is insufficient to help me determine whether the unit itself isn't working, or whether I just don't know how to use it.(I suspect the latter.) In some circumstances, in the mountains or a jungle, knowing how to use the navigator can be a life and death matter, so I think the maker of the product has a duty to the purchaser to provide adequate, if not excellent, documentation regarding its use. Garmin may have designed a very nice piece of electronics, but it failed its higher duty to provide adequate instructions for its use, which is a serious safety consideration in my opinion.

Many improvements
I replaced an Oregon 300 with a 450. Not only is the screen brighter and easily read in direct sunlight, the unit is faster and has several new software features.

Garmin 450 GPS
I like the 450 in all aspects except for display visibility in daylight, sometimes you just can't read it. I also had to send the unit back because of poor battery life. Even with NIMH batteries, I could get only 3-6 hours from a set of batteries unless they were fully charged and I used them immediately, then I could get 8-10 hours. Garmin technical support acknowledged something is probably wrong with my unit, and is exchanging it. On the positive side, it maintains contact under poor conditions and the ability to make maps from Google Maps and Google Earth is extremely helpful. I used that capability to generate a city map for Budapest that turned out to be very accurate. All in all, I would highly recommend the unit assuming the battery problem is unique to my unit.

Love, Love, Love it
This is the 3rd GPS we bought for geocaching and by far the most userfriendly, don't even need to look at the directions and I'm pretty much computer challenged. It makes geocaching so fun, gets us within 6 feet every time without doing the fish hook dance that the magellan has us doing, you know, go forward 5 feet, now turn 180 degrees and go 6 feet and turn 180 degrees and go 9 feet now do this about 10 times, My son was holding the GPS and I was following him looking like Mrs. Gomer Pyle. The Oregon just omits the little dance so you blend in and no one was wanting to call the guys with the white jacket to pick me up. The only complaint I would have would be it is not very bright in the sun light but I can work with that. You get all the hints and logs when you download from [...], it saves the title (which the Vista did not) can mark it as found or not found, easy on batteries, can't get much easier then this. When my son goes off to college he gets to keep the Magellan, momma gets this one, lol. If you're on the fence this is the one I would buy again, no hesitation.

Great GPS, poor documentation
Garmin's engineers have created a great handheld GPS with good features. Unfortunately, they only did half of the job. The documentation is incredibly poor lacking any information on important details. For instance, the device has a set-up feature to tell it whether you are using Alkaline, Lithium. or NiMH rechargeables. Why? Does it recharge the NiMH batteries when externally powered? Are there different functionality/preferences for the different battery types? Nothing in the documentation to indicate why it cares.

Another example is the MicroSDHD card device. There is no indication of what size cards are supported. I installed a 16GB and it allowed me to install maps and such onto the card; however, when I attempted to install two DVD's worth of 24K quads to the card the basemap application crashed and required me to reformat the SDHD externally before the GPS would recognized it again. Ok, so maybe the map files are limited to 4GB? Well I installed just shy of 4GB of topo onto the 16GB card and everything worked fine. However, when I attempted to install some geocache files and waypoints, it tells me that the drive is full (even though there is 12GB left). So I guess the GPS only supports cards up to 4GB.

As I said a great device, and the above limitations are something I can live with, but it would be nice if they put in a modicum of effort in writing a decent manual.