Looking for a good cyclometer

Polar cs100

Cateye Mity 8. Reliable, long battery life, unclips easily.....and low-priced.

Don't buy a Vetta (just my own personal opinion), I was given one as a gift and hated how fiddly it is to install...the battery is not a common size and I had to hunt around for ages for one...the buttons are sometimes confusing (but I am used to Cateye so I suppose that explains it)
Guess what my favourite is ? Cateye !!😄
easy to fit, easy to use, easy to find replacement battery, they seem to have a model to suit almost every rider...small and convenient....luv them heaps😉

You wanna really get him something nice, that wont break your pocketbook, get him a Blackburn 'Delphi 3.0' computer. Trust me, he'll love it.

If he has shimano shifters/brifters, how about a flightdeck computer? It's integreated into the shifter and even has cadence.

I just got mine and hooked it up yesterday, actually. Can't wait to put a battery and try it out.

The total price for the computer and harness was $45

At the basic end I think bike computers are almost a commodity because they are so similar in features, function and price.

I have a preference for the Cateye Enduro. It's among the easiest to install and it has a heavier, more durable, wire. It also uses an easy-to-find watch battery but that won't be an issue for at least a couple of years.

Spoke magnet/pick up location, dead batteries, and wire harness issues are the three most common trouble shooting problems with such basic computers. The Cateye Enduro is among the best for all three.

I think that the first step is to figure out what functions are important to you (or the gift recipient). The basic decision points are:

- wired or wireless - it's nice not to have to fiddle with wires, and the wireless ones give a cleaner look, but there is a modest cost adder, and you also have to put a battery in the transmitter

- speed sensing only, versus speed and cadence sensing. Basically this is deciding whether you need a second sensor to monitor crank rotations, in addition to the first sensor that monitors wheel rotations. If it is a wired computer, then you have two wires, or at least a "two-headed" wire. If it is wireless then it costs more to get two wireless sensors. (A lot of roadies would view cadence sensing as a critical feature, whereas it probably doesn't mean much (if anything) to mountain bikers.)

- do you want the speed sensor to be fittable to the rear wheel, instead of the more usual front wheel, so that it will still work if the bike has been mounted on a training stand? Rear wheel speed sensing is somewhat unusual as a feature. The Cateye Astrale model offers wired rear wheel and cadence sensing. Some of the higher-end wireless units have sufficient transmitting range to allow the speed sensor to go on the rear wheel. Of course the cadence sensor is almost as far away, so rear-wheel speed sensing tends to go along with cadence sensing.

- other functions like alititude and grade, or heart-rate (which requires a wrist-strap sensor).

- whether the computer easily handles moving between two bikes (a lot of models support two sets of set-up configurations)

I had basically decided to get a Cateye Micro-Wireless unit, which is a very prevalent speed-only computer with a good feature set, since it is available from lots of ebay sellers for about $35 or so, incl. shipping. I wanted the wireless cadence feature as well, but it was going to up the cost quite a bit. But then I found a good price on a slightly used VDO unit with both wireless speed and cadence, so I ended up going that route.