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Bad HR accurancy

Hello,

I've purchased Garmin Vivoactive 3 around 2.75 years ago. And as my friend borrowed me his Fenix 6 Pro Solar smartwatches, I strapped my one to my left hand and his one to the right one. Feel free to check the huge difference between two runs

vivoactive 3 Fenix 6 Pro Solar

And if you need links:

Fenix 6 pro solar: https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/10360152211

vivoactive 3 https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/10360160124

I gotta say I expected Fenix to be "better", but from the comparsion it looks like the vivoactive is just plainly bad. If I add the fact they are just 2 and 3/4 years old, all the battery problems all the time (sometimes they loose 15 % per day, sometimes 50 %), irreplacable battery and basically an expectation that every second patch usually screws the battery all over, and I need to reset after activities or paying by garmin pay + charging every night, I am really unsatisfied. They were cheap, but even amazfit of my wife is performing better :/

0 hhasert over 1 year ago

Optical wrist based heartrate is not very accurate on any device. It depends on the activity whether it works correctly, typically running is ok-ish, but f.i. crosstraining is a challenge. Secondly it takes time typically before the veins expand a bit due to exercise for optical sensors to catch on the heartrate (which varies with your generic condition, so it worsens when you get more fit ;-). My tip is to use an external sensor which can be a chest strap (electrical and thus accurate) or an optical arm band (optical but my experience is that it catches on better than a wrist based one) and connect it to the watch.

I see the vivoactive lagging a bit and that is also my experience on the VA3M, so I bought a chest strap for crosstraining since for short exercises it screws up major. I bought a cheap Fitcent device (which is rechargeable and works like a charm) and never use the optical sensor in the watch other than for walks in the park.

0 Skretik over 1 year ago in reply to hhasert

I do understand it's "not very accurate", however you can see above it was one running activity measured by two garmins with optical wrist sensor, thus both having same conditions - except of the fact vivoactive was on my left hand (as I'm right-handed), while fenix was on my right hand, and to be fair I MIGHT have tried to switch them in the middle just in case somehow one of my hands is better for measuring.

But you can see that the "HR saw" provided by Fenix is what you'd expected there, while there is just "something" at V3 not really matching the speed. I mean if I gave you the HR graph from Fenix, you'd be probably able to reconstruct what happened there. No way you might do the same from Vivoactive 3. I mean... sure, both have HR sensor in parameters, but the data from it are clearly completely different.

0 hhasert over 1 year ago in reply to Skretik

Yes, I saw and I do agree that the vivoactive sensor seems a lot less accurate than the Fenix one (there is a price/generation difference). There might be a wrist difference, you never know (I would try the same run with the watches reversed ;-), but honestly you should do the comparison with a chest strap to see which one is correct. I agree however that the Fenix is more likely to be correct. Generally from the forum I get the impression that the VA3 line is ok for running, so I cant explain why it seems to be so far off the mark. For me, the VA3M is unusable for crosstraining so I switched to external sensors.