leekage issues have been widely acknowleged as resolved.  The CS issues can be noted as horrid on both sides of the house, so pick your poison.

  I'm sure the bird's are great units, but lets not dip into denial.  The current Lowrance offerings are fresh, while the bird imaging has a bit of age.  When/if hb decides to brush things up, I"m sure image quality will be equal.

If Lowrance simply reverse engineered the Humminbird product, than yes, I suppose a suit is reasonable. But if what is depicted on the screen is arrived at by a different solution, than no, it's not. Since sonar all shares some commonalities, it's the particulars which are important. It probably requires some pretty smart engineers to make those distinctions. What makes me nervous is when it's left up to jurors to decide complicated technical matters. In the court of public opinion, it usually comes down to which product joe layperson is most loyal to.

I bought the HDS units after much comparison. Here is a pretty good side by side look at the two technologies

http://b b c b o a r d s . z e r o f o r u m . c o m /zerothread/483630-downscan-vs-downimaging-by-fishton

Just remove the spaces in the body of the url.

I checked out the images.  Looks to me like the humminbird image was not as light, but the contrast level was higher.

I don't know what adjustments are available, but I do know that I can produce images that look that different on the same television whether it be a CRT, LCD, or plasma.

It's also possible to edit any photo and make it look over developed or underdeveloped.

The background on the Lowrance is much lighter than that on the Humminbird which is nearly black.  The contrasting bright areas on the Humminbird look like neon compared to those on the Lowrance.

The image on the Lowrance is definitely better as posted, but is that the result of differences in adjustment?

No, this is just a single example, and wasn't meant as a bash, just as an example of the current "state" of each. Examples such as this are plentiful, this isn't an exception to the rule.

  As I've stated, I would assume each will get better with scheduled software updates.

I think this will be a pretty messy suit. Patent infringement is not something I would ever want to deal with . They could lose millions.

They could win millions with a counter suit. I bet it's all settled without any of us ever knowing the results. They both will continue to produce, market, and sell the idea.