Get the best electronic you can afford. If all you can muster is 100 bucks then get that unit. Any unit, I mean any unit this day and age will provide a lot of bottom structure, depths, temperature gagues all in one nice unit.
Use the one you can get by on and be happy with the way you voted.
95% of the time I use my unit to tell me how deep the water is, not to find fish, but to tell me how deep the bottom is or either to show me some bottom contour, struture on or near the bottom. Most of my fishing is done kinda shallow.
I fish this one area and I like to stay between 6-9 feet of water, if I go into 5 foot I move back to deeper water, if I move or drift to 10 foot or deeper I move back to 9. This is a zone in this particular lake that I have found to be great for taking large, extremely large shellcracker (up to 2 pound and maybe a little better) and x-tra large 1 to 1 1/2 pound size bream.
Yep you might be right, you can catch more of them closer to the bank, but those are usually hand size, these I'm talking about are bohemith size and would rather fight and land one of these than 10 handsize.
I have used it on occasion to find fish in deeper water and have found them and caught some fish off of dropoffs or cliffs. Just hate fishing all that deep water. Guess I'm just a swamp man that likes to fish shallow flooded willows and bullrushes and lillypads.
Hold tight fish on
Tight lines <*)))))>{