Just before Oshkosh: “Garmin introduces its largest TXi touchscreen flight display yet”. If you want to spend $200,000 on an avionics upgrade to a -G2 Cirrus airplane that was worth $150,000 in pre-Biden dollars in pre-coronapanic times you can now get a 12″ display from Garmin. Did they fix the absurdly low 1280×768 resolution on the 10″ displays that made approach plates illegible unless the pilot wanted to remove his/her/zir/their right hand from the controls and pinch/pan to view different parts of the plate sequentially? It seems that Garmin’s latest and greatest 2025 display has the same resolution as the old one, i.e., 1280×768. This is the resolution that consumers got in 2014 from the Samsung Galaxy Mega 2 ($150 pre-Biden dollars).
How does it look? (ignore the red bands, which are artifacts from the camera/display interaction)
I guess the theory is that the Garmin autopilot is so good the pilot doesn’t have anything better to do than pinch/zoom/pan.
The same company, for a little more than 1/100th the price, introduced a “smart buoy” that keeps track of SCUBA divers (press release). I can’t figure out why it is so difficult to deliver 1080p resolution (1920×1280) to aviation customers.
Figure the pilots are too far from the screens for it to matter. They’re supposed to use their $2000 tablets.
“Old Man Yells at Cloud”
Luxury. Anyone would be lucky to have 1024×768, touchscreen no-less. And the $200K upgrade gets you a *dual* processor, buddy.
Try this with 58 year old eyes:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Cessna_162_Skycatcher_N5201K_0986_instrument_panel.JPG
The Garmin G300 has 1 (or optionally 2) 7″ 800×480 VGA displays.
Should I upgrade? I don’t think that new one would even fit my rig, even with coercion by hammer. Maybe as a Luddite I should downgrade to analog?