Customer Reviews for Garmin - Approach R50 Premium Golf Launch Monitor and Simulator - Black
Customer Rating
4
It's good, not great (yet!)
on March 19, 2025
Posted by: dale57
The Approach R50 is okay at what it is meant to do. What makes it shine is the simplicity. I have a blast playing with this with my dad and friends. It's easy to boot up, and you can get on a course in no time without having to bring in a computer and mess with settings. I do have some complaints. Garmin is painfully slow with updates. It is near impossible to play with a righty and a lefty (no play through mode). It lacks basic featues from GSPro such as scramble. The putting is lacking and I feel that I need to play with the altitude a bit to fake boost my clubs so they give me the same results as in real life.
My assumption is that these complaints will be solved in time with software updates. Until then, it's still a great time.
I have it for 30 days and have been pleased so far. I compared it to Trackman and Flightscope and the numbers were very close. My only negative is the hitting area is quite small. This is a concern as I use it outdoors on the range and have to move it about every six shots.
I reviewed as many launch monitors that were in my price range. The Garmin has every feature I was looking for. No need for an expensive gaming computer. So far the yardage seems close to my range. Zero concerns and it has the Garmin name to back it up.
Am loving the R50. User interface is very intuitive. I can dial into anything I'm working on. Bought an external monitor and a great return net and am hitting more balls a day than my body can handle. Highly recommend. Incredible value. 2.7 index, and going down.
I’ve used mine for a few weeks and two issues I’d like to see resolved are one the distances seem to be off by 10-15 yards per club and two when I’m in practice range mode I can’t seem to get the previous tracers to disappear and after a few shots you can’t tell what ball flight you have.
Response from GarminBy Garmin, March 5, 2025
Thank you for your review and experience with the Approach R50. We would like to discuss this further over email. If you would please email us at product.support@garmin.com.
Been using about 3 weeks. Slowly educating myself on this. There is a ton of useful information. The first thing I learned is that you need to use balls with logos and put the logos towards the r50. Since I’ve been doing that, it reads my ball every time. It’s fun..
I found the Garmin R50 incredibly user-friendly and intuitive. Unpacked the device, updated the software and started hitting balls in the space of half an hour. Because of the technology used (photometrics) your setup can be compact - unlike launch monitors based on doppler-radar technology which require minimum distances for ball tracking. The one thing though I found just plain annoying is that the driving range software clutters up the view with the ball trajectories of the shots you played before, instead of just refreshing the view for each new shot. I sincerely hope that Garmin will fix this in a future software update.