LA is no afterthought at ISLA. It is a ridiculous statement to make and you should retract it as it was made out of ignorance. If you have given up on ISLA and are unhappy with your product or the speed with which new images are provided are we are happy to refund all of your purchase cost and remove you from our data base if you return your chips. Just send us an email letting us know and we will get it done.
You really have no idea what goes on at ISLA, how the work gets done, or what is really involved in creating the files for the charts and particularly image files. Updates for map vector features are totally different from updates to images. The two are mutually exclusive and are produced and created separately. Map lines and points and features can be changed and ready to go in a day or less and those updates go on every week all over the place. We are changing and releasing map vector features weekly. We will be updating the St. Marks area with further details on Monday and Tuesday for instance. The maps that are sold one week are routinely slightly different from the maps sold the next week because of these vector updates. It could be a moved set of markers, some stakes, a new bar highlighted, a new Poll and Troll area, a broken or moved daymarker or moved buoy etc. As another current example, we just got word of a new large sandbar that has formed in the St. Johns river that could be a navigation issue. We are looking into that now and if it is true, it will be reflected on the charts that are sold within a few days of us confirming it and we will likely send out an email about it as well if it is substantive.
There have been no imagery updates in FL since last fall and LA imagery has been in the works since then. Fixing images so they appear correctly and are bright and clear and seamless is extremely time consuming. LA is particularly challenging. ISLA is updating the entire database of images for LA. Every photo is from an airplane and adjusted by hand and many of the images are very hi resolution at 3 and 6 inches and are proprietary. Fixing the problems such as sun glare, brightness, contrast, color etc., that are always inherent in aerial images encompassing hundreds of square miles is a major undertaking and can take a very long time. Many of the images are more challenging to work with in LA and the number of different data sets is larger as well. There is no short cut to producing what we do. It's all done by hand and on the water.
We don't skimp on quality and work to put out the best imagery. We would like to be able to get it all out immediately, but there is no shortcut to it and trying to create one would result in something similar to what people complain about every day on other charts. There is a good reason the others get so many complaints about their image quality and accuracy and have the reputation they rightfully earned. It is very hard to do what we do here and because of economics and scaling efficiency, they will likely never produce any images that are close to our standard; it is not an efficient business model given the current technology. But here, the economics and efficiency is not what drives us. It's not about money here and it never was right from the beginning. It was about fixing the problems. ISLA was born out of frustration with the other charts that fail so miserably but it was never originally conceived to be a product for sale. It just grew into that by word of mouth after the first charts were created that fixed the problems years ago. ISLA has grown to the business it is and has the reputation it has because we do things very differently from the other guys.
We have come a long way on this image update project for LA and hope it will be released this summer. We apologize for your frustration. If it was possible without cutting quality, it would have been out early this year but the datasets of images have proven to be more challenging to process than originally anticipated and we don't want to cut quality on appearance or resolution.
