Unfortunately, only Lowrance maps work in current Lowrance receivers.
About the pricing, my theory is:
Lowrance is facing a catch 22 with these. Licensing data to make decent GB maps costs a fortune. Obviously, Lowrance needs to recover their investment in such data. The decision that any investor is facing is: do we price our product low and try to sell a lot and recover a little bit from every sale or, do we try to recover more from each sale but risk selling fewer products.
With competition from Garmin, Magellan and now others, Lowrance may be concerned that at low prices they still not sell enough to recover the investment. They do make excellent receivers so, they may figure: once you start using our hardware, you may not be very happy with anything else so, you may be willing to pay extra for the maps.
Again; this is something what I think, not what I know.
