Paper maps will prevail as long as not-rich people are interested in (real) outdoor activities.
Paper maps have a consistency and security no digital navigation device I ever owned or saw ever had.
I realize this is a kind of "get off my lawn" argument one could also make about digital vs analog newspapers, or books.
The key is: If my Kindle decides to do some weird updating and requires re-downloading all my books, well I guess I won't read on my subway ride home. If my map does that in northern Scandinavia, well now I am fucked.
Just print 5 maps and laminate them and you're pretty safe against weather and time. Not so much with a digital map.
Print something and it will show that print as long as it is not physically destructed. Not so much with a digital map ("oh, our services don't work in this country ha ha. Did you not read the t&c?")
Sun glare. Off the grid for three weeks. Weight. None of this is a problem with analog maps.
I guess you can solve most of these problems by throwing lots of money at god knows what military/navy device, thus I specified non-rich people. Or you know, just use a paper map.
I couldn't agree more. I keep maps in my vehicle for this reason, and people give me a hard time for it. No matter what I say I can't seem to get people to understand why it's still important to have maps.
Get out of cell phone service, which isn't uncommon in rural America...or lose the charge on your phone...and wind up on a winding country road...and see how well you can get yourself to civilization.
Two is one and one is none. With the way we depend on technology, it seems that society is always one power outage away from chaos.
It's not even hard to lose cell service near urban areas. In the Angeles Nat'l Forest by LA you lose cell service real quick, not even 15 miles from major civilization.
I'm like you, too. I have an awesome Harley-Davidson map book that has complete maps of almost all highways in the entire USA, state by state. Also has maps of large metro areas in it, too.
Additionally, I always buy one of those NatGeo maps for wherever I'm going hiking/backpacking/camping (typically nat'l parks/monuments, but also Nat'l forests, state parks, etc.)
With these, I'm always prepared for no cell service.
Google has had offline maps for years now. I always keep my local area updated, and whenever I go to a new place a download the map for it first. I've had out of date directions on my phone, but I've haven't had an issue with out of signal since offline maps became a thing.
I do not recall ever having drained my cell battery completely. And I have a car charger.
There are reasons to keep paper maps around, but lack of signal and running out of battery aren't on the list.
Can confirm. I run the Great Lakes Relay [1] each year. It's a 275 mile course along northern Michigan. We go through some heavily wooded areas for multiple days at a time. We usually do not have cell service. Even GPS is spotty at times. Furthermore, the driving directions and running directions don't always use roads. Here's some examples:
Driving directions: turn left at C509 (unmarked) for 2.9 miles. The exchange is past the creek. There will be big puddles, plow through them.
Problems happen when you're in a Honda civic that can't go through 2.5 feet of water. So you have to turn around and find your own way to the exchange, with no cell service.
We always bring multiple copies of a Michigan Atlas. This way we can pinpoint where we are (using GPS) and find nearby roads, despite the terrible race directions.
As far as I know, the US Army still teaches land navigation using a paper map, protractor, pencil, and compass. At least they did when I was in (early 2000s).
Getting caught with a GPS-capable device on the land nav course was considered cheating.
Celestial navigation has not been a primary means of navigation at any time since I was on active duty from 1995-2018. It has only recently begun to be taught again at all -- maybe in the last 3-4 years IIRC.
Indeed: a battery-less 50” analog ink screen is not to be sniffed at when conveying information that changes at slowest on literally a glacial timescale, and at its fastest on the timescale it takes to decide where should we put this new road?
When we travel by car, I always print out our route. There are long stretches of highway usually and I really don't want my phone on the whole time (especially at night). I'll jot notes on the paper about mileage and roughly what time I need to start looking for the next exit. I really only use the phone GPS when the destination gets close.
FWIW in the infantry, traditional land navigation is still considered an essential skill. Batteries can die, equipment can be broken but a compass is a pretty simple and hearty piece of kit.
I actually print and use paper maps a lot, specifically topographic maps. We do a decent amount of backcountry riding, and while not completely accurate, the USFS and USGS maps have various trails marked on them that are useful.
USGS publishes nicely formatted quadrangle-sized PDFs when smaller areas are enough, and CalTopo provides custom PDF generation when it’s more useful to specify a range. These I print at home on a 24” Epson 7800 and some paper I really like for the purpose (iGage Weatherproof Paper).
Indeed, paper maps are alive and well in the field of hiking/camping. It is a terrible experience trying to navigate even on the biggest of phone screens. Even the stuff one can print at home is, maybe, on an A3 sheet of paper, hopefully in colour. A vast improvement over the phone, and still not unwieldy. But to me, nothing compares to those huge mapsheets that fold accordion style. You can take in SO much more of your terrain and locate yourself so much better in your surroundings.
One of my favourite things to do while out hiking is to sit with a compass and a map and try to identify peaks and glaciers. I could do it for hours.
ETA: Everything I've heard about CalTopo makes it sound like God's gift to us.
In the Scottish hills I carry an iPhone with OS mapping app with a backup external battery pack, and usually a 'proper' OS paper map and a backup printout of my route overlaid on an OS map. The idea that paper maps were obsolete is news to me!
More than once I've had to give people my backup paper map copy because they had no idea where they were, usually as their phone has run out of charge!
The Ordinance Survey digital maps are great. But, yeah, I carry an external battery pack, often even a spare smartphone, and a paper map. The paper is mostly just a backup but I don't want to be in a situation hiking where a dead phone puts me in a bad position.
Yeah, I'll carry a paper map for mountain biking out where I may not have a cell phone signal, as a backup to any maps stored on the phone.
That said, I remember saving up a bit of money as a kid to get 2 or 3 USGS topo maps. Now, I can get pretty good topo maps of the entire world for free from my browser. That's a beautiful thing.
Have you used trailforks.com from pinkbike? Their app combines a lot of data with the actual map, plus it's hard to beat how current they are due to crowd-sourcing. Definitely focused on biking but expanding into other users and works offline.
I knew some folks that worked for Natural Resources Canada. They were part of the "press team" who printed all sorts of wonderful maps. The press room held an enormous high-speed press... I loved the smell of the place. Ink, oil, machinery and reams of paper. These guys... so highly skilled, as much art as technology. The maps were beautiful...even the ones with mistakes. They would cut them up and make scratch pads out of them. All this was shut down years ago... they knew the end was coming. It makes me sad just thinking about it.
I was with you until the 'extremely hard to use in the dark or with night vision' because that is just about the only time they work much better than paper ones.
But maps of all sorts are a dying breed, the bulk of the uses for maps were to find directions and turn-by-turn voice navigation has made the map component pretty much optional.
What displays do you use for in the dark? For paper you can shine a pin-point of green light and read it. That works for old-style LCD like a CASIO watch but I've not seen it work for a display designed to be backlit like a tablet. And you'd need a specially adapted display that used an IR backlight to use with night vision - I haven't seen something like that in practice. My smart watch has a night vision mode, but that's an LCD.
>What displays do you use for in the dark? For paper you can shine a pin-point of green light and read it. That works for old-style LCD like a CASIO watch but I've not seen it work for a display designed to be backlit like a tablet.
Why do you need to shine light on a backlight? You can read it directly at night.
>And you'd need a specially adapted display that used an IR backlight to use with night vision - I haven't seen something like that in practice. My smart watch has a night vision mode, but that's an LCD.
If it's about reading the map while navigating through the night in unknown territory in some emergency situation (lost in the woods?), I'd see where that would be a problem.
Otherwise, I wouldn't go trekking/hiking at night either. Who does, so that that "map reading at night while maintaining night vision adaptation" to be a real non-outlier concern?
If the use case is reading a map at a campsite, e.g. to prepare for tomorrow's hike, then the "night vision adaptation" should not be that important, and a backlit map device would do just fine. And you can have the screen at low brightness and not mess (or not mess much) with your night vision adaptation.
Where do you napkin-estimate the percentage of people in the venn diagram AND of "uses maps", "need to read them at night", "need to maintain night vision adaptation while doing so", "has some night vision contraption to be able to read things they shine light on"?
As for night vision, you mean when wearing vision enhancement optics? I did not fully understand you the first time, I thought you meant night vision as in 'night adapted eyes', where you'd lower the intensity as much as possible not to ruin your night vision. Not sure what the implications would be for electronically enhanced optics but if they use a display you could of course put the map straight on the display?
Yeah I meant image intensifying optics. They're usually not digital unfortunately - they're analog - so you can't easily use them to look at digital image.
And how are you going to take a compass bearing off an image being beamed straight into your eyes?
And the problem with a digital map with a backlight is it lights you up like a beacon!
E-ink is used in the Amazon Kindle's which take quite a bit of abuse and run just about forever on a battery charge. Of course all the usual comparisons between paper and technology still hold.
There was a cartoon on that subject where they re-invented paper as an improvement on the laptop. 'Can be read in full sunlight', 'lasts for 100's of years on a single charge', 'can be burned safely in a pinch' and so on.
I'd hate to try to pan and zoom on a map to try to navigate using an e-ink kindle with the refresh rate and flashing it's just barely usable as an ebook reader with page flips but anything interactive like scrolling on a page is pretty bad the few times I've tried.
Try panning and zooming on a piece of paper... that's the benchmark here. I've had the pleasure of toting along a couple of kilos of maps of all the roads in Europe for years, I would not part with my TomTom for the best set of maps and the most elegant of night lights.
But you rarely need to see a hundred square km all at once. You almost always end up folding the map to some area of interest after you've located where that is (which can take some time, with the crappy lettering on most maps and the lack of a good index, which if it is there tends to get out of date fairly rapidly). I really don't miss maps. Though for backup purposes they are probably still quite useful.
Using a map for hiking and for road driving are pretty different scenarios. On a GPS for car driving I don't need to really look around much it already knows where I am and I can just search for where I'm going. Hiking there's not really anything to search for and things like battery life are a bigger problem.
Are you in or simulating tactical conditions (to not give away your position)? If so - definitely paper + low intensity light. Otherwise, why is backlit an issue?
I'd dispute this. I built a vector tile package out of OpenStreetMap a couple of years ago. This gives you offline building level mapping for the entire globe on an SD card, and can be displayed on a smartphone app. Whilst OSM isn't perfect and coverage is variable, one would have to get pretty far off the beaten track for it not to be of at least some practical use. So with this capability all you need is a charged phone and you can travel anywhere in the world knowing you have at least some sort of mapping even without a network connection. I suspect one would need a truck to transport the equivalent in paper maps.
What are you disputing about the arguments I made though? There's no point having the whole world on an SD card if you can't see the device at night, can't see it through your optics, and you can't display the map on a wall or a table for everyone to get around.
Ok but I'd say your headline isn't supported, i.e. 'There is no way that digital maps are anywhere near as practical, let alone more practical, yet.' - it's possible that all of the things you said are true, and that it is still more practical to use a digital map due to the disadvantages of paper maps i.e. fixed scale, inability to restyle or interrogate data on the fly, data currency, etc. And I think the example I gave is pretty compelling - put a dataset like the one I created on your phone, and all you have to worry about is keeping your phone charged in order to have mapping anywhere in the world, or carry a battery charging brick. There's a pretty huge gulf between the inconvenience of having to carry a battery brick versus a truck full of paper maps.
The range of activities where the arguments you made hold versus those in which they are not of concern is becoming ever narrower - I'd struggle to think of much beyond recreation/extreme environments/military examples, and these are very much a minority compared to the rest of the digital mapping world.
Don't get me wrong, I love paper maps too and have seen some pretty amazing examples - in the atrium of one facility I visited they had a two-storey high printed OS style map that was quite something - but the world has moved on. Perhaps e-ink displays will marry the two back together at some point.
And imo it's easier to unfold a full sized map which immediately displays a wide area, to get your bearings, as opposed to having to zoom/pan on a digital map.
Minor inconveniences but arguably a smoother experience. Of course when I sat digital map I'm pretty much referring to Google maps on a phone.
* aren't robust to water, dirty, or even manipulation
* require extra equipment to read on the dark
* can be cut and folded, but lose usefulness on the process (I really don't get your claim that cell phones can't be hold in a hand)
But that last point is spot on. Ditto for the people talking about writing on the map (digital could improve on this front).
Anyway navigating a paper map requires some careful folding and unfolding that is quite slow, and you must carefully select what maps you'll bring every time, while for digital maps you just bring the entire continent.
I don't see how one can declare any of them a clear win. The answer depends too much on your use case.
The paper maps we use for multiday rafting trips are all waterproof. The thing will sit in the water in the bottom of your boat all day, then you throw it in the sand. It gets a little patina but has no problem with dirt/sand/water.
Totally agree that neither digital nor paper maps is a clear winner. Each use case has different requirements and sometimes digital is better and sometimes paper is.
Laminate your map and use dry-erase map pens. I did it for years in the dirtiest, wettest environments possible. A typical cell phone wouldn't last hours, much less a day.
Boats have been carrying waterproof paper maps for decades, and for thousands of years before that carried vellum maps with waterproof ink. I have waterproof maps on my boat, the physical maps are required by the US Coast Guard.
You do not need extra equipment to read in the dark, you just need to not be standing next to a street lamp. Your eyes adjust quite well. If the moon is out you can read a map with sunglasses on. The moon is plenty bright enough to cast shadows and read by if there are no external light sources nearby.
If you use paper maps for any period of time, folding them becomes second nature, this is like saying that reading books takes too long compared to watching movies because you have to learn to read. On boats, navigational maps are rolled and there is dedicated space for unrolling them. Not all maps are used in the backcountry. Also maps come in bound formats called atlases which are quite convenient. Also Mapscos.
I feel like this post was written by someone who grew up in a post google maps world.
> Boats have been carrying waterproof paper maps for decades
I didn't argue that they weren't waterproof. I laminate all my maps. I know they can be waterproof.
> You do not need extra equipment to read in the dark
Fundamentally, you're going to need a torch or image intensification on occasion. There can be not enough moonlight to read a map to any extent.
> If you use paper maps for any period of time, folding them becomes second nature
Yes that's what I argued was a benefit of them - that they can be folded easily.
> On boats, navigational maps are rolled and there is dedicated space for unrolling them
Yes that's what I argued was a benefit of them - that they can be displayed on a table.
> Not all maps are used in the backcountry.
Yes, I argued an advantage is being able to put them on the wall.
> I feel like this post was written by someone who grew up in a post google maps world.
I've spent hundreds of days operating by map alone all around the world. So, no.
I feel like you read my comment and somehow got the opposite understanding of every aspect. I was arguing that paper is better, and you've come in said no actually paper is better?
There's a beautiful map store in London that I visited. If I recall, everything in there are contemporary "originals" -- meaning printed in that year, no re-printing. So a 1973 map of the Underground was from 1973. They also had very old, beautiful maps. I wanted them all!
After 20 minutes, I began to realize my wife was casually leafing through dozens of poster-size maps with £30,000 price stickers on them. My jaw nearly dropped. Her hands held "art" that they valued at close to £500,000++. I also realized I couldn't afford the map I wanted and left empty-handed
You can also visit the National Library of Scotland Map Room in Edinburgh - they have a mindboggling 1.5 million sheet maps. https://www.nls.uk/collections/maps
While they don't sell originals, they do reproductions on demand for a lot less than 500k. I was just looking at a 1934 sheet for my wall, £27. Tho mainly I go to their site to jump back and forth in time, they have a great georeferenced map browser that lets you see how places have changed.
One advantage of paper maps, for me, is that they're much better at installing a 'model' for a city in your head.
With digital maps, I can navigate from place to place to place pretty easily. But then I retain virtually no information. I end up with no 'nose' for how to find my own way home.
But if I study a map on paper, laboriously plan my route in advance, and then follow it IRL — it's like magic. That route is installed there forever.
Do that enough times, and navigating even really crazy big cities starts to become instinctual. No GPS required.
Yup, that's basically what I do on my motorcycle. I map out a route in my head and try to memorize it. Even if I miss a road, I have a pretty good mental model for alternative routes.
Well, they're alive. The USCG made paper charts optional for US-flagged vessels in 2017. Most cruisers use chartplotters at the helm, and chart apps on phones or tablets for route planning.
At this point, I tend to use my iPhone at the helm as well. The charts are updated more often, and the location and tracking are very accurate (with an external Bluetooth GPS).
I own a few Butler motorcycle maps. Phones kind of being impossibly inconvenient on a bike. My riding suit even has a giant back pocket specifically for easy access to a map.
We come at this from a strange perspective, as we dealt in old maps for the last thirty years or so, mostly paper, but on occasion things on silk, cotton or rayon.
It's an amazing non-proprietary technology, paper. Even things that are water damaged over the centuries, or obscured by foxing (a kind of staining), many times can be reversed and brought back to a clean state(we've worked some near miracles ourselves on some 18th century maps just recently). Without vulnerability to bit-flip, or cosmic rays compromising the data and rendering a work useless and corrupt, paper is lo-tech and easily enduring.
The paper map also enables a comprehensive view of the subject at many different scales, without having to move a cursor, pinch or expand... none of that, your eyes just take in and adjust. The benefit is an understanding of context and relationship. When we do presentations at schools it always interests us that there is a fragmented understanding of how things relate for some students, which almost feels like an artifact of digital cartography. In a digital world the constant zooming in an out, first to find the greater region, and then to reach down into the detail of a street or land feature. The problem is at that tight detailed scale, it's hard to see how it relates to much of its surroundings. You can push around at that detailed level and form some understanding, but it feels abstract, especially for those that don't have the best visual memory. The paper map affords a certain level of pattern recognition at different scales of detail without constant enlarging and reorienting.
We have maps going as far back as the late 15th century with the matrix of the paper being made of nothing more than cotton fiber, not gold or titanium, just simple cotton. When we read of the challenge of preserving the digital world and the technological progress of our species, it does concern us that even the best storage technologies available might reach 100 years or so.
Timothy O'Reilly in a talk a few years ago mentioned the danger of how technology can be lost. He mentioned how the great church, Hagia Sophia was the largest building on earth for about 1000 years, but then there was a long pause before anything came close to its stature again, almost as if the technical understanding of how to build at that scale was lost. In an era where almost everything is developed, distributed and saved in a digital format, perhaps we should print more hard copies, not just for backup purposes, but maybe for the unique perspective that that simple 2 dimensional surface can supply.
It might be an unpopular opinion, but in my experience a sizable amount of paper maps is just bad. I have more than once regretted buying hiking maps which where missing trails or roads. These will die first (if they haven’t already), and I can’t say I am sorry.
My brother new by profession alot of the paper cartographing crowd. They where absolutly blown away by google maps. The concept, that somebody would freely give away satellite images, the gold coins of cartography, was beyond imagination for them.
Sometimes i think, this was the plan behind the piracy support by some companys for some time. Disrupt the media companys and then take over.
Supply what others depend on for free - and wait until the industry collapses, then rule the wastelands.
Much of the world did not have access to maps till the middle of the last decade when smartphones became the default way people navigated.
I had never seen a map of my hometown in India (pop 1.3M) that was more detailed than the state or district-level till about 10 years ago, and now we have maps that show side-lanes and gullies and rickshaw pullers use their $50 smartphones with $3/mo data plans to find their way around.
Romanticizing the past is great as long as you come from a rich background.
I think it's a bit harsh to call an article by, for, and about British and Australian map-making "privileged" and "west-centric" in the sense that it's tautological. It would be another whole article, and a fascinating one, to track civilian mapping in India from the British occupation to Lonely Planet guides. I encourage you to follow up on this idea, either to research and write it yourself or find others who can (maybe even write to the article's author to raise your point and suggest it).
My experience in India as a student backpacking there 20 years ago was that tourist maps were inadequate, the LP guide was worth its price for the city maps alone, and locals on the street couldn't read either kind to help you. I don't know if it was illiteracy or just unfamiliarity, but outside of hotels and tourist centers, about half the people we asked on the street were baffled by a map and unable to orient themselves on it to help us. I'm sure they knew their way around, we just couldn't communicate with words (expected) or pointing at maps (unexpected).
There is a sibling comment that says in some cases there were also military reasons. I don't know about India, but I did run across this in Ecuador. To get a topographic map to climb a volcano, we had to find the Military mapping office and show our passports. Obviously, they wanted some control over the cartographic information. Now, world-wide topographic maps are available on google maps with terrain turned on. The data for which I believe was obtained by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission in 2000:
I guess they weren't needed then perhaps? Generally local maps here in the states, until the invention of the automobile were drawn up by whatever county or city the maps were for, yes, you could buy a copy, but they were not in common circulation unless you had a car.
Some places aren't mapped for political/military reasons. The idea being that a public map would be helpful to an invading force so they are prohibited by law.
In other places the maps are purposely incorrect to be of less use to an invading force.
Making life hell for locals is considered an acceptable side effect for national security.
Paper maps have a consistency and security no digital navigation device I ever owned or saw ever had.
I realize this is a kind of "get off my lawn" argument one could also make about digital vs analog newspapers, or books.
The key is: If my Kindle decides to do some weird updating and requires re-downloading all my books, well I guess I won't read on my subway ride home. If my map does that in northern Scandinavia, well now I am fucked.
Just print 5 maps and laminate them and you're pretty safe against weather and time. Not so much with a digital map.
Print something and it will show that print as long as it is not physically destructed. Not so much with a digital map ("oh, our services don't work in this country ha ha. Did you not read the t&c?")
Sun glare. Off the grid for three weeks. Weight. None of this is a problem with analog maps.
I guess you can solve most of these problems by throwing lots of money at god knows what military/navy device, thus I specified non-rich people. Or you know, just use a paper map.
- Backpacking for one night: Probably just phone (I use an app called Offline Topo Maps, works great).
- Backpacking for an extended amount of time: Paper
- Backpacking in winter/snow: Paper and Phone. (Only use the phone for when I'm not quite sure where I am)
- Motorcycle tour: Phone.
- Multiday rafting: Paper.
- Bicycle Tour: Phone and Paper.
- General Travel to a new place: Phone.
I feel as if one isn't necessarily better than the other, they both have their pros & cons for different activities.
Get out of cell phone service, which isn't uncommon in rural America...or lose the charge on your phone...and wind up on a winding country road...and see how well you can get yourself to civilization.
Two is one and one is none. With the way we depend on technology, it seems that society is always one power outage away from chaos.
I'm like you, too. I have an awesome Harley-Davidson map book that has complete maps of almost all highways in the entire USA, state by state. Also has maps of large metro areas in it, too.
Additionally, I always buy one of those NatGeo maps for wherever I'm going hiking/backpacking/camping (typically nat'l parks/monuments, but also Nat'l forests, state parks, etc.)
With these, I'm always prepared for no cell service.
I do not recall ever having drained my cell battery completely. And I have a car charger.
There are reasons to keep paper maps around, but lack of signal and running out of battery aren't on the list.
Driving directions: turn left at C509 (unmarked) for 2.9 miles. The exchange is past the creek. There will be big puddles, plow through them.
Problems happen when you're in a Honda civic that can't go through 2.5 feet of water. So you have to turn around and find your own way to the exchange, with no cell service.
We always bring multiple copies of a Michigan Atlas. This way we can pinpoint where we are (using GPS) and find nearby roads, despite the terrible race directions.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Relay
Getting caught with a GPS-capable device on the land nav course was considered cheating.
USGS publishes nicely formatted quadrangle-sized PDFs when smaller areas are enough, and CalTopo provides custom PDF generation when it’s more useful to specify a range. These I print at home on a 24” Epson 7800 and some paper I really like for the purpose (iGage Weatherproof Paper).
One of my favourite things to do while out hiking is to sit with a compass and a map and try to identify peaks and glaciers. I could do it for hours.
ETA: Everything I've heard about CalTopo makes it sound like God's gift to us.
More than once I've had to give people my backup paper map copy because they had no idea where they were, usually as their phone has run out of charge!
That said, I remember saving up a bit of money as a kid to get 2 or 3 USGS topo maps. Now, I can get pretty good topo maps of the entire world for free from my browser. That's a beautiful thing.
Digital maps:
* rely on precious battery charge and weight
* aren't very robust
* are extremely hard to use in the dark or with night vision
* can't be cut and folded into something small and light enough to hold in a hand
* when portable aren't large enough for displaying on a table or wall for people to gather around
But maps of all sorts are a dying breed, the bulk of the uses for maps were to find directions and turn-by-turn voice navigation has made the map component pretty much optional.
Why do you need to shine light on a backlight? You can read it directly at night.
>And you'd need a specially adapted display that used an IR backlight to use with night vision - I haven't seen something like that in practice. My smart watch has a night vision mode, but that's an LCD.
Who, aside the army uses night vision?
You can't use a backlight at night - you'd light yourself up like a beacon, and destroy your night vision adaptation.
Otherwise, I wouldn't go trekking/hiking at night either. Who does, so that that "map reading at night while maintaining night vision adaptation" to be a real non-outlier concern?
If the use case is reading a map at a campsite, e.g. to prepare for tomorrow's hike, then the "night vision adaptation" should not be that important, and a backlit map device would do just fine. And you can have the screen at low brightness and not mess (or not mess much) with your night vision adaptation.
Where do you napkin-estimate the percentage of people in the venn diagram AND of "uses maps", "need to read them at night", "need to maintain night vision adaptation while doing so", "has some night vision contraption to be able to read things they shine light on"?
Anyone doing alpine climbing will at some point start in the dark and/or return in the dark.
As for night vision, you mean when wearing vision enhancement optics? I did not fully understand you the first time, I thought you meant night vision as in 'night adapted eyes', where you'd lower the intensity as much as possible not to ruin your night vision. Not sure what the implications would be for electronically enhanced optics but if they use a display you could of course put the map straight on the display?
And how are you going to take a compass bearing off an image being beamed straight into your eyes?
And the problem with a digital map with a backlight is it lights you up like a beacon!
There was a cartoon on that subject where they re-invented paper as an improvement on the laptop. 'Can be read in full sunlight', 'lasts for 100's of years on a single charge', 'can be burned safely in a pinch' and so on.
You can open a paper map up and look at a hundred km squares at once at a resolution no display can match.
The range of activities where the arguments you made hold versus those in which they are not of concern is becoming ever narrower - I'd struggle to think of much beyond recreation/extreme environments/military examples, and these are very much a minority compared to the rest of the digital mapping world.
Don't get me wrong, I love paper maps too and have seen some pretty amazing examples - in the atrium of one facility I visited they had a two-storey high printed OS style map that was quite something - but the world has moved on. Perhaps e-ink displays will marry the two back together at some point.
And imo it's easier to unfold a full sized map which immediately displays a wide area, to get your bearings, as opposed to having to zoom/pan on a digital map.
Minor inconveniences but arguably a smoother experience. Of course when I sat digital map I'm pretty much referring to Google maps on a phone.
* weight a lot more than digital
* aren't robust to water, dirty, or even manipulation
* require extra equipment to read on the dark
* can be cut and folded, but lose usefulness on the process (I really don't get your claim that cell phones can't be hold in a hand)
But that last point is spot on. Ditto for the people talking about writing on the map (digital could improve on this front).
Anyway navigating a paper map requires some careful folding and unfolding that is quite slow, and you must carefully select what maps you'll bring every time, while for digital maps you just bring the entire continent.
I don't see how one can declare any of them a clear win. The answer depends too much on your use case.
Totally agree that neither digital nor paper maps is a clear winner. Each use case has different requirements and sometimes digital is better and sometimes paper is.
You just laminate them.
I know, I know, IP ratings. Okay... good luck.
You do not need extra equipment to read in the dark, you just need to not be standing next to a street lamp. Your eyes adjust quite well. If the moon is out you can read a map with sunglasses on. The moon is plenty bright enough to cast shadows and read by if there are no external light sources nearby.
If you use paper maps for any period of time, folding them becomes second nature, this is like saying that reading books takes too long compared to watching movies because you have to learn to read. On boats, navigational maps are rolled and there is dedicated space for unrolling them. Not all maps are used in the backcountry. Also maps come in bound formats called atlases which are quite convenient. Also Mapscos.
I feel like this post was written by someone who grew up in a post google maps world.
I didn't argue that they weren't waterproof. I laminate all my maps. I know they can be waterproof.
> You do not need extra equipment to read in the dark
Fundamentally, you're going to need a torch or image intensification on occasion. There can be not enough moonlight to read a map to any extent.
> If you use paper maps for any period of time, folding them becomes second nature
Yes that's what I argued was a benefit of them - that they can be folded easily.
> On boats, navigational maps are rolled and there is dedicated space for unrolling them
Yes that's what I argued was a benefit of them - that they can be displayed on a table.
> Not all maps are used in the backcountry.
Yes, I argued an advantage is being able to put them on the wall.
> I feel like this post was written by someone who grew up in a post google maps world.
I've spent hundreds of days operating by map alone all around the world. So, no.
I feel like you read my comment and somehow got the opposite understanding of every aspect. I was arguing that paper is better, and you've come in said no actually paper is better?
After 20 minutes, I began to realize my wife was casually leafing through dozens of poster-size maps with £30,000 price stickers on them. My jaw nearly dropped. Her hands held "art" that they valued at close to £500,000++. I also realized I couldn't afford the map I wanted and left empty-handed
While they don't sell originals, they do reproductions on demand for a lot less than 500k. I was just looking at a 1934 sheet for my wall, £27. Tho mainly I go to their site to jump back and forth in time, they have a great georeferenced map browser that lets you see how places have changed.
With digital maps, I can navigate from place to place to place pretty easily. But then I retain virtually no information. I end up with no 'nose' for how to find my own way home.
But if I study a map on paper, laboriously plan my route in advance, and then follow it IRL — it's like magic. That route is installed there forever.
Do that enough times, and navigating even really crazy big cities starts to become instinctual. No GPS required.
At this point, I tend to use my iPhone at the helm as well. The charts are updated more often, and the location and tracking are very accurate (with an external Bluetooth GPS).
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/07/18/2017-15...
https://www.dco.uscg.mil/Portals/9/DCO%20Documents/5p/5ps/NV...
But I sure hope you still keep your sextant and charts dry and safe below deck somewhere if you spend any time at sea.
It's an amazing non-proprietary technology, paper. Even things that are water damaged over the centuries, or obscured by foxing (a kind of staining), many times can be reversed and brought back to a clean state(we've worked some near miracles ourselves on some 18th century maps just recently). Without vulnerability to bit-flip, or cosmic rays compromising the data and rendering a work useless and corrupt, paper is lo-tech and easily enduring.
The paper map also enables a comprehensive view of the subject at many different scales, without having to move a cursor, pinch or expand... none of that, your eyes just take in and adjust. The benefit is an understanding of context and relationship. When we do presentations at schools it always interests us that there is a fragmented understanding of how things relate for some students, which almost feels like an artifact of digital cartography. In a digital world the constant zooming in an out, first to find the greater region, and then to reach down into the detail of a street or land feature. The problem is at that tight detailed scale, it's hard to see how it relates to much of its surroundings. You can push around at that detailed level and form some understanding, but it feels abstract, especially for those that don't have the best visual memory. The paper map affords a certain level of pattern recognition at different scales of detail without constant enlarging and reorienting.
We have maps going as far back as the late 15th century with the matrix of the paper being made of nothing more than cotton fiber, not gold or titanium, just simple cotton. When we read of the challenge of preserving the digital world and the technological progress of our species, it does concern us that even the best storage technologies available might reach 100 years or so.
Timothy O'Reilly in a talk a few years ago mentioned the danger of how technology can be lost. He mentioned how the great church, Hagia Sophia was the largest building on earth for about 1000 years, but then there was a long pause before anything came close to its stature again, almost as if the technical understanding of how to build at that scale was lost. In an era where almost everything is developed, distributed and saved in a digital format, perhaps we should print more hard copies, not just for backup purposes, but maybe for the unique perspective that that simple 2 dimensional surface can supply.
Sometimes i think, this was the plan behind the piracy support by some companys for some time. Disrupt the media companys and then take over.
Supply what others depend on for free - and wait until the industry collapses, then rule the wastelands.
Much of the world did not have access to maps till the middle of the last decade when smartphones became the default way people navigated.
I had never seen a map of my hometown in India (pop 1.3M) that was more detailed than the state or district-level till about 10 years ago, and now we have maps that show side-lanes and gullies and rickshaw pullers use their $50 smartphones with $3/mo data plans to find their way around.
Romanticizing the past is great as long as you come from a rich background.
My experience in India as a student backpacking there 20 years ago was that tourist maps were inadequate, the LP guide was worth its price for the city maps alone, and locals on the street couldn't read either kind to help you. I don't know if it was illiteracy or just unfamiliarity, but outside of hotels and tourist centers, about half the people we asked on the street were baffled by a map and unable to orient themselves on it to help us. I'm sure they knew their way around, we just couldn't communicate with words (expected) or pointing at maps (unexpected).
There is a sibling comment that says in some cases there were also military reasons. I don't know about India, but I did run across this in Ecuador. To get a topographic map to climb a volcano, we had to find the Military mapping office and show our passports. Obviously, they wanted some control over the cartographic information. Now, world-wide topographic maps are available on google maps with terrain turned on. The data for which I believe was obtained by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission in 2000:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Radar_Topography_Missi...
In other places the maps are purposely incorrect to be of less use to an invading force.
Making life hell for locals is considered an acceptable side effect for national security.