D2Xs
Latest
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 tweaks D2X DSLR with new D2Xs
Never one to rest on its laurels, Nikon has taken the already highly-rated 12.4 megapixel D2X digital SLR and tweaked several features that are probably very important to professional photographers (but mean little to the rest of us) to come up with the new D2Xs. The major enhancements to this model include an improved 2.5-inch display, longer-life battery, the addition of a black and white mode, Adobe RGB support in all color modes, and better viewfinder performance; other, less exciting improvements are a new menu color scheme, extra 1/3 stop ISO settings, more Custom Curve options, and electronic viewfinder masking in High Speed Crop mode -- we can't even tell you how long we've been waiting for this last option. Making the best even better usually doesn't come cheap, though, but the D2Xs will only set you back a pretty reasonable $4,700 when it's released next month.
