I've known, trusted, respected, the Suunto name for top compasses for ages. But frankly what I keep hearing about the company, and experiencing when I contact them, has me scared. They can routinely take 2-4 weeks to answer an email, and their answer is usually "Ask your local dealer" when the question was too technical and the dealer said "Ask Suunto."
And not that I put complete trust in online reviews or in store clerks, but I've seen a lot of both saying the Zoops like to fail a couple of months after the warranty ends. You'll notice, no extended warranty (not even from the third parties that cover all kinds of electronics on Amazon and eBay) will cover dive computers. That says something.
I have gone over the manuals on the Zoop, Leonardo, Mares Puck, and the Zoop display and interface certainly look subtly better than the others. Like having 5 ascent rates instead of three. And just having a clearer display, in case you are getting confused while trying to read it, for whatever reason.
Suunto won't even recognize that there are three generations of Zoop (according to the dealers) with unspecified internal differences. And as of last month, wouldn't even tell me the Nova was about to be released, apparently a week later.
I'm not really impressed with the "human interface", the display and ease of use, of any of them. IIRC (and I may not) if there's an excessive surface interval, you can always scram the Zoop and do a total reset. But if you follow the discussions about bubbles and microbubbles from DAN and other sources, the surface intervals are NOT excessive. The USN taught me that there were "cold water tables" back when the dive industry said there was no such thing. Well, funny thing, even PADI tables tell you to bump over one group for cold water now. (Cold, by USN definition, means you are wearing more than a bathing suit.) Do any of the computers take that into account? Certainly none of these mention it, just "personal comfort" or other "conservative diving" factors.
Computers, very nice. Nice that they can monitor ascent rates--often to unspecified degrees, on the edge of the display. Not very prominent for such important information. But dive tables never flood, leak, or malfunction. And their warranty is way more than one year.(G)
