best ice pack for lowrance

my dad is looking for a flasher and doesn’t want to spend alot of cash. he owns a Lowrance mark 4 which comes with flasher mode and gps the screen is a little small but he doesn’t mind that. the question is should go with the genz hard pack and buy the ice ducer separate or get the lowrance ice softpack. does anyone on here prefer one to the other using the soft water graphs. personally i have the fl8 with the genz pack and it does thee trick for me. just wondering if anyone has the mark 4 and uses it for ice fishing and if so which route i should send him on. i know the soft pack kit from lowrance is around 125.00 or so and the genz pack is significantly cheaper. do you think one is perhaps better for either hole hoping or safer for the fish finder. i’m more inclined to tell him to get the soft pack. any input would be great.

I think the lowrance soft pack kit also comes with a battery, so it’s not priced too much more. I have my hds5 on a genz box, only downside to me is the genz box doesn’t fit in a 5gal bucket.

We’ll mine can now, but I milled a bunch off the handle so it’ll slide in on it’s backside.

is the hds 5 a lcd screen

Yes, it’s a TFT LCD.

does the cold bother it much. i know the mark 4 is a led screen so i dont think the cold will bother it at all

I just mounted an Elite 4 combo to an old blue box I had and bought the ice ducer. I used a small Ram mount to mount it to the bottom of the box. I also bought the cig lighter and a extra Ram base to set it up in my pickup. Although I like the setup, I can’t share a lot about performance as I have only used it once. Now I have a flasher in a soft pack and a gps/lcd combo on a hard pack, I realy don’t see much difference other than the pro packs have a slightly smaller footprint and keep snow off when you are not using it.