Product of the Week: Suunto D9
Tuesday April 15, 2008
In the world of feature packed dive computers the Suunto D9 may very well be king. The D9 has all the bells and whistles in a neat wristwatch-like package. With a new streamlined look, the D9 now combines all gauges into one stylish package. Read my full review of the Suunto D9.
Comments
I have 50+ dives on the D9. The compass feature while unique is not that practical. It uses up a lot of your battery power and automaticaly shuts off after a couple of minutes. So, if you are trying to follow a course you constatly have to bring it back up. If you do not use the deepstop feature (pref for 2 minutes) your decomp times are way off. When diving with a VR3 on one dive my deco was 5 minutes while the D9 was 20! You cannot set both a deepstop and a 10 or 15 ft safety stop, the countdown timer will only work on one of them. You must memorize all the locations for dive info as the labels are too small to read. Alarms start going off well before set limits (eg will sound, light at 120 feet when depth alarm is set for 130). Any type of see-saw (even 10-20 feet up and back down) dive will throw off the deco times a lot. Yes, I would buy it again but you must learn the idiosyncrasies of this unit. I got less than a year off the $90 transmitter battery.