The Quick Verdict
Honestly? These two together is the setup. The S70 on your wrist for course strategy, hole maps, and the full picture before you pull a club — the Z82 in your pocket for when you need to know exactly how far that tucked pin is. At $650 + $600, you're looking at $1,250 combined, which isn't cheap. But these are genuinely different tools built to complement each other, and Garmin designed them to work as a pair. If you're picking just one: the Z82 edges it for low-handicap players who care most about precision, and the S70 wins for anyone who wants a golf computer on their wrist that also tells time.
What They Actually Do
The S70 is a full-color AMOLED smartwatch that maps the hole, tracks your shots, and tells you what club to hit. The Z82 is a laser rangefinder with a GPS overlay in the viewfinder, giving you within-10-inches accuracy to the flag. Both are legal in tournament play with slope disabled. Both live in the Garmin Golf app ecosystem, and both are about as premium as these categories get.
The Real Tradeoffs
Precision vs. convenience
The Z82 is accurate to within 10 inches at the pin. The S70 gives you front/center/back with GPS precision — solid, but not the same thing. On a 175-yard approach where the pin is tucked back-left and the front of the green is 162, that difference actually matters. The Z82 tells you 178 to the flag. The S70 tells you 175 to the center. Pick the wrong one and you're short in the bunker.
That said, for tee shots, layups, and hazard management, the S70 is faster and gives you more useful information. You're not targeting the pin from the tee box — you're figuring out whether that fairway bunker is 235 or 250 so you can decide whether to go after it.
Speed of use
Glance at wrist. Done. That's the S70 in a nutshell for routine yardages.
The Z82 requires you to pull it out, raise it, find the flag through the viewfinder, lock the laser, read the number, pocket it again. On a busy Saturday morning when the group behind you is already annoyed, that sequence adds up. For quick tee-shot yardages or mid-fairway layup distances, the watch wins on pace of play every time.
What you see before you pull a club
This is where the S70 does something the Z82 fundamentally cannot. Standing on a tee box you've never seen — say, a 390-yard dogleg par 4 with water down the left — the S70 shows you the whole hole. Carry to clear the water: 212 yards. Fairway narrows at 265. Layup leaves 140 to center. The Z82 can't help you here. There's nothing to point at except the woods.
Flip the scenario: you're 165 yards out, the pin is front-right with a false front that'll kick long approaches off the green, and you need to know if it's 158 or 164 to that flag. The S70 says 163 to center and shows you a green outline. The Z82 says 161.7 to the exact flag. That's the one you trust.
Green contours and course intelligence
The S70 shows green contour maps — you can see the slope and shape of the putting surface before you even get there. The Z82 has a 2D CourseView overlay in the viewfinder, which is genuinely cool and gives you hazard context while you're ranging, but it's not a substitute for seeing the full hole layout on a color display on your wrist. A rangefinder will never show you green contours. That's a category-level difference.
The Garmin ecosystem — this matters more than you'd think
Both products run through the Garmin Golf app. Both support the same 41,000–43,000 course database. The virtual caddie on the S70 uses wind, elevation, swing history, and shot dispersion to recommend a club — and that wind data can be relevant context when you're also ranging with the Z82. They're not wireless companions (the Z82 doesn't relay measurements to the S70's display based on the data here), but they share the same data infrastructure, the same app, and the same round-history ecosystem. That's a real advantage over mixing a Garmin watch with a Bushnell rangefinder.
Battery and charging
Both are rechargeable, and both claim up to 15 hours in GPS mode. The S70 needs to come off your wrist and charge. The Z82 stays in the bag and charges when you remember. Neither should die mid-round if you charge them the night before, but the S70 has the added pressure of being a daily-wear watch — if you forget to charge because you wore it on a run Tuesday and again Wednesday, Thursday's round gets dicey.
Tournament legality
Both have slope modes, and both have tournament modes with slope disabled. The Z82 has a tournament mode indicator light so you know it's legal before you start. The S70 has a tournament mode setting. Cover your bases on both — slope-adjusted distances aren't legal in most stroke play events.
Who Should Get Which
Get the S70 if you play a variety of courses and want to know the lay of the land before you take a swing. If you're the golfer who wants shot tracking, virtual caddie club recommendations, scoring, and strokes gained data — all on your wrist, all on one charge — the S70 is a genuinely impressive piece of kit. Also the right call if you want a daily-wear smartwatch with music, payments, and fitness tracking baked in.
Get the Z82 if you play the same few courses and know them well enough that hole maps aren't the priority — but you want dead-accurate pin distance on every approach. It's also the better pick if you don't want another device to charge on your wrist, or if you're a lower-handicap player where the difference between 158 and 164 to a front-tucked pin actually changes your shot.
Get both if you're serious about your game and want to remove guesswork from every part of a round. The S70 handles pre-shot course strategy and post-round data. The Z82 handles the moment of truth at address. This is what a lot of single-digit players actually do, and the Garmin ecosystem makes it feel intentional rather than redundant.
The Bottom Line
Two Garmin products built to solve different parts of the same problem. The S70 answers "how do I play this hole?" The Z82 answers "how far is that exact pin?" Neither fully replaces the other, and together they're a pretty complete distance solution. If you have to pick one, your handicap and how you like to learn a course will make the decision for you. But if the combined price doesn't make you wince too hard —
Get both. The S70 on your wrist, the Z82 in your pocket.