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PhotoTrackr Plus brings geotagging to Nikon DSLRs, leaves your hotshoe open
Oh sure, Nikon's got its own solution for adding native geotagging to your existing DSLR, but the GP-1 dongle definitely has its drawbacks. Aside from sucking down around 4x more power than Gisteq's new PhotoTrackr Plus, it also eliminates the ability to use a dedicated flash in the hotshoe while capturing GPS data. Moreover, it has to warm up every time you turn the camera on / off, and there's just 18 tracking channels compared to the Gisteq's 44. Regardless of the back and forth, we do appreciate the PhotoTrackr Plus' ability to plug directly into the 10-pin terminal that few amateurs even think to recognize, though we do fear that the reliance on Bluetooth could cause issues if you stray too far from the transceiver. Still, this newfangled dongle is far superior to its past iterations, both of which simply logged data as you went and then added metadata after you synced the information with your images via PC; this dongle, however, embeds the data right away into every image. Better still, there's even a price advantage to going third party -- Nikon's aging GP-1 is pushing $200 on many webstores, while the Gisteq apparatus can be procured right now for $179. Take your pic, as they say.
Nikon's geotagging GP-1 dongle now available
When we asked how you'd change Nikon's 720p-recording D90 DSLR, many of you globe-trotting photogs let out wistful sighs, gazed at the brightest star, and wished with all your might for automatic geotagging of photos. Like some trickster genie, Nikon is granting your wishes, but we're not sure the GP-1 GPS add-on is exactly what you had in mind. It slots into the hot-shoe on most cameras (clipping onto the strap for a few) and uses an unwieldy looking cable to connect to the body of your D200, D3, D700, D90, D300, or D3X. We can't say that we're particularly fond of the device's means of indicating status, either: red blinky light = no satellites; green blinky = three satellites; green solid = four satellites or more. C'mon Nikon, for $240 you couldn't integrate that cable into a hand strap and put more than two LEDs up in there? [Via Gadget Lab]
