I just looked on marine deals and the Cuda 300 they had was the display only, which is only useful if you have broked your display but still have the cables and transducer alresady on the boat.

Thanks, I hadn't noticed the other one on its own row at the bottom of the page.  I have the 250, which is the same but has a lower resolution screen that the 300 I think.  Works fine, but I'm no expert on fishfinders.  I usually leave it on "idiot mode", I know this isn't the best use of them, but at least I get to know when there's a fish under me -and how big it is.  Love the depth alarm as well, always handy when navigating around the mud banks on the manukau.

cheers for the good advice!

Why do you say stay away from them? The Cuda series are very good wee units, they have a decent pixel count on all but the 128 models and show fish sign well for around $150!  They are very reliable and can take a hammering so at that price point they are excellent, still have zooms, voltage, whiteline, alarms etc.

They have a very good mount setup and the plugs are generally better than Humminbird which are terribly troublesome. Generally the Cuda range is identical to the Lowrance models, but some units are down slightly on RMS power output and some won't do volts.

I fitted hundreds of them and the Lowrance equivalent models like the X47, M52, X51 etc to kayaks for years for customers and they performed very well.

A cheap colour unit will display exactly the same information albeit using colour grades instead of shades of grey to show density, there are some excellent black and white units out there like the Furuno LS-4100 that are far better than the bottom end colour Garmin's and Humminbirds IMO. Too many people get hung up on colour, expecting it to be the magical cure for finding fish... sure they are nicer to look at but don't count out greyscale units altogether in the budget end of the market.

Most importantly learn how to read a fish finder and it's returns and NEVER use fish symbols as a display mode.