43 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Delorme Disappoints, April 30, 2010
This review is from: California Atlas & Gazetteer (Delorme Atlas & Gazetteer Series) (Perfect Paperback)
Being the owner of a number of Delorme Atlas & Gazetteer's, I was replacing a worn out Northern California version. This edition, covering all of California is the replacement for both of the older Northern & Southern California Atlas'. Rather than adding more pages, they have changed the scale to fit the maps onto fewer pages. The result is that this is much more like a road atlas, but at two or three times the price.
It really is a disappointment. Pretty much every reason I collected them before: the scale, the detail, has disappeared. They also seem to have used their now very old data to produce it. For example, they still show an airstrip in Atwater that has been gone for at least twenty years. Not abandoned, but changed into an industrial area and kart track.
Even with GPS maps, there is a market for these atlas & gazetter products, but only if they have at least as much detail as the older versions. Otherwise, get a road atlas. You won't be missing much, and it will probably be more current.
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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great road trip companion - with one modification, July 5, 2008
This review is from: California Atlas & Gazetteer (Delorme Atlas & Gazetteer Series) (Perfect Paperback)
I was recently the navigator on a 10 day California coast road trip. I ordered the Delorme Atlas to serve as a back-up to my Nuvi GPS. The map is certainly is the better way for looking ahead for rest areas. Half way through the trip, the binding cracked and pages began to fall out. Not good when driving in a convertible with the top down! So I stopped at a Kinko's Copy Center and they replaced the binding with a spiral binding. Now it went from a good atlas to a great atlas! I'm certainly going to do this to any other Delorme atlas I use in the future.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Utterly Unreliable, DO NOT BUY, June 21, 2011
This review is from: California Atlas & Gazetteer (Delorme Atlas & Gazetteer Series) (Perfect Paperback)
At first blush this Atlas looks authoritative and promising but it does not bear looking at closely. It is riddled with mistakes. I am an ex-cartographer with many years of experience in the field. I am also a map collector. And I also prefer maps to GPS devices. I find them to be much more fun. But there is no fun in this atlas. I have lived in California all my life and know Southern California like the back of my hand. Though I am not sure what primary sources were used in the making of this atlas, I strongly suspect that Delorme got into trouble using outdated USGS maps.
They also made some very bad decisions in their cartography. For example, they show, in the many urban areas of the map, a myriad of lines spider-webbing all over the place. These are unnamed roads which do the user absolutely no good whatsoever without the names. They clog up the map terribly and Delorme should have forgone this vanity and, instead, shown less roads but named the ones they showed. This is an unforgivable flaw in this atlas. Furthermore, very important information is not shown at all: the full course of a very important road (especially to tourists)--Mulholland Drive--is not shown. A very popular tourist destination and Los Angeles County Park, Devil's Punchbowl, is omitted entirely. Utterly useless place names that haven't been in use in two generations pop up on this map in great abundance adding to the systematic disinformation this shabby product provides. The mistakes are legion--too many to list here. But, to demonstrate their cavalier attitude toward accuracy, I will point out that they have completely omitted an entire intersection on Interstate 15 in the Temecula Valley: Indian Truck Trail.
This Atlas is now in the outhouse where it belongs and where I can peruse it to turn up even more errors. The more one looks at this the worse it gets. If Delorme would do a job this badly on the California Atlas (probably used by more tourists than the atlases of any other state), I shudder to think of what kind of job they've made of the atlases of the other 49 states.
My advice is to either find another large-scale atlas of California, download large-scale hybrid printouts from Google Earth (or a similar site)or use your GPS. Whatever you do, do NOT use this atlas as a guide to the many unpaved roads that cover much of the thinly populated areas of Southern California or you might well find yourself in big trouble. The reason for this is that in just one winter season some of these roads are washed out or riddled with boulders that make them impassable.
I would also like to point out to any tourists to Southern California to be very, very conservative in your decision to go off the paved road, unless you are very experienced and know SoCal well. Death Valley National Park, to just name one area of many, deals with lost, missing and expired tourists regularly who decided to be adventurous and take an upaved route through mountains or desert.
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