Petrel 20ft safety stop?

[Dr. Lecter]

The Atomic Cobalt is under recall. I'd personally stay away from that one.

This is the statement of either a fool, or, of someone deliberately giving a fact without context to be misleading.

Certain Cobalt serial numbers are under recall to confirm that their HP connection was, in fact, tightened properly. No new Cobalts are under recall, and there's nothing about the computer's design that necessitated the recall. Getting it checked and, if necessary fixed, is easy, free, and gets you a shiny new cover to boot.

I dive a Petrel and love it, but I still own a Cobalt and it is in many ways a better designed dive computer for recreational diving than a Petrel will ever be. For tech, the Petrel is the clear winner...but interestingly, the Cobalt also almost always gives a much less conservative decompression profile than the Petrel for any given dive (unless I really tweak the GFs on the Petrel), with a bias towards more and longer deeper stops and significantly shorter shallow stops.

A month or two ago I sent my Cobalt in to have a button adjusted and checked for the recall while they were at it. Cost me all of $11 to ship it to Atomic in a flat rate box from Hawaii, and I had it back in my hands in perfect working order two business days later at no cost to me.

There are plenty of reasons to choose a Petrel over a Cobalt, but the quality of the computer is not one of them.

 

[Stoo]

A bit of an old thread, but as someone who dives somewhere in that "little bit rec / little bit tec" window, I bought a Petral simply because I'm tired of replacing "pucks" every two years. I dive alone a lot, so I wear two of them. Constant replacement gets expensive. From everything I've read, Shearwater makes a bombproof unit, and the odd time that there is a problem, they make it right one way or the other.

The cost is certainly more, but if the thing lasts more than 3 years, I'll easily justify it. (My new "backup" computer is one of the pucks in gauge mode, and some tables.)

The last few pucks I b*ggered were returned to manufacturers (or the manufacturer was contacted prior to return) and they weren't repairable. The one exception was that USD (which distributes Apex in Canada) replaced a dead Quantum which was great considering it was long past warranty.