| for navigation or fishing? I think the lakemaster chip gets to detailed and hard to read when navigating through islands. For the Fishing hands down the lakemaster chip is the bees knees.
It's a horse a piece in many ways and both offer good coverage of that area of the lake. As you get further north towards Kenora you "run off the map" right now but they're getting it mapped further and further north each year.
I find the Navionics chip easier to read overall since it's less cluttered, but the Lakemaster chip offers some superior features. On a Humminbird unit with a Lakemaster chip you can turn off the contour lines for easier navigation and turn them back on when you stop to fish. It also displays the safe travel routes on Lake of the Woods, while the newer Navionics maps do not. The Lakemaster chips offer incredible detail, but when you overzoom it can become difficult to read even on a 10" screen whereas the Navionics maps remain pretty clean and readable even at maximum zoom. On older units with less computing power, the Navionics chip will load faster when zooming in and out and scroll more smoothly. On new units with more memory they both refresh quickly.
One thing to keep in mind is that even the best survey will miss certain spots, especially on a lake as big as this one. It's easy to make two passes by a certain area and for there to be a rock sticking up right in between where the survey boat ran. I found one of these this year that topped out at 2' and was not shown on either the Navionics or the Lakemaster, but was listed on the Canadian Hydrographic paper map. I think the main travel cooridors tend to be better, but the further you get away from those the more careful you should be.
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