Paul - thanks, but it seems a bit of a misnomer to call it synthetic vision - you are simply relying on a computer database to display terrain which may or may not be 100% accurate - you are not even using radar to map what is actually in front of you. Not something I would trust my life with.
Crab,
I don't have an opinion on the name, just what it's being called:
Garmin and
Foreflight both use the term.
As for how trustworthy, here's a PDF page discussing the
Jeppesen database.
It contains a reference to the resolution of the data, which was asked in a previous posting:
The SRTM data has a resolution of 3 arc-seconds (90m) and 16 meter vertical accuracy.
While I would be reluctant to trust the data to fly the aircraft in normal flight ( like, without looking out the window), if I found myself in an IIMC encounter and it said there was terrain, I would tend to believe the data ( i.e I'd turn away from the charted terrain): in my experience both the terrain and the obstacles seem to correlate well with what I see from the cockpit.
As I said previously, the resolution ( 295 feet by 52 feet ) doesn't sound like it's good enough for an encounter down in that terrain we see in the tour videos, but it's probably sufficient to guide you away from a prominent ridge. I'd be interested to hear peoples opinion on data fidelity in terrain like Kauai... I think the intent was always to guide an airplane away from major terrain features, not as a high resolution terrain map for NOE helicopter flying. Still, it's pretty impressive to have a global database with this kind of resolution available for essentially free.