Help! Puck Pro, Leonardo, or Zoop?

[jay bee]

I have a Zoop, and it works quite well. BUT
- It doesn't show nitrogen loading after I've surfaced (my old oceanic did that and I find it very useful).
- The buttons are very hard to push. They are small and metal and bruise my fingers.

For those reasons, I'm researching a replacement, and currently leaning toward either the Mares Puck Pro and the Oceanic Veo 180, which as far as I can tell are both inexpensive quality computers with all the right features.

 

[dmaziuk]

Personally, for $240 I'd add ten bucks and buy a DG03. $200 for Puck Pro is probably a nice discount, esp. as their PC uplink cable is only $50. A downside is it's infra-red. Veo has a USB cable, but that's a hundred bucks like most of them. Overall, between Veo + cable @ ~$300 and Puck Pro + cable @ ~$300 I'd still add fifty bucks and buy a DG03 + cable for $350.

(And of course Veo has The One True Algorithm(tm) and every other algorithm will kill your dog, burn your house down, and run away with your girlfriend.)

 

[guruboy]

You can get a puck pro for about $150 new

 

[dmaziuk]

You can get a puck pro for about $150 new

That's a pretty good price if it's the pro and not the "amateur" puck. With $50 uplink cables, I think that's the cheapest you can get a new DC at the moment.

 

[Freewillow]

Leonardo is simple with big "numbers". I read that most Suuntos are too conservative but I never used one.

 

[fmerkel]

Yes, the Suuntos are conservative, very conservative with multiple deep dives.
I think the Suunto manual is the worst of a bad lot. I suggest you download and read the manual for any computer you are interested in. Some have a decent interface, some suck. You will get different opinions on which are easy or difficult so you are best to form your own opinion.

On a trip recently that had a number of very experienced divers WITH Suuntos and the manual downloaded 4 different people couldn't figure out how to change the O2 percentage on a buddy's Vyper Air. I finally did but it took me 2 days. What a hassle. The damn thing kept going into deco when I had lots of NDL time left on my computer. We were using 32%, I set mine on 30% (UWATEC ALadin) and the Vyper on 36% to get a semblance of NDL parity.

I also have my own (older) Suunto Favor (air only), used as a backup. I think it must have a somewhat more liberal algorithm than the Vyper, but I still 'bent the snot' out of it and it locked me out for 39 hours.

 

[scubadada]

I don't think it's a good idea to enter an incorrect FO2 to try to game the decompression algorithm. For the Uwatec, obviously, the change made it more conservative and was very safe, like diving nitrox on an air setting. On the other hand, the Suunto setting made the computer more liberal than is intended. I would not encourage divers to use this strategy