For those that want an affordable fish finder, the Hummingbird Fish Finder 718 can be a great choice. Although it doesn’t have a full color screen, it has quite a few options that will fulfill its role of the instrument for finding fish on your boat.
The Humminbird 718 head unit features a 16 grayscale, high resolution screen, 320V x 320H. The display is 5 inches in diagonal, like most of the fish finders in the 700 series.
It’s equipped with a DualBeam Plus sonar, meaning that you can adjust the view, and observe in split-screen, both the 20° and the 60° returns. Although it is said that this unit will provide accurate returns even if used for fishing in waters up to 1000 ft. deep, I wouldn’t recommend this unit for fishing in deep waters. A few users have complained online about it’s accuracy for deep water fishing. They reported on having accurate results just for waters up to 200 ft. deep.
This unit has a 2400 Watts PTP output.
The Hummingbird fish finder 718 is also GPS and trackplotting compatible. Keep in mind that you’ll have to purchase an additional antenna, to activate the GPS functions. Anyway, don’t expect this grayscale unit to display charts and to become a super marine GPS device. It is not compatible with the Navionics or Lakemaster charts, nor it has any Humminbird mapping package. Your route will be shown on your screen as a black line on a grid, without pointing out the shoreline. However, it’s useful to save waypoints, routes, speed and exact location of your boat. You can store up to 750 waypoints and 10 tracks up to 2,000 points each.
Although this unit doesn’t excel with the GPS features, it’s a great unit for finding fish. It’s really easy to use and affordable, and for a recreational angler or boater it would make a good choice.
