ATP Electronics GPS PhotoFinder Pro

Comments about ATP Electronics GPS PhotoFinder Pro:

I bought this device just before an African Safari and it worked most of the time. Often times it would take 10 minutes to get a fix. Twice on a 10 day trip the device "hung" and did not log any track information. Dropping the device once caused it to shut off. Button presses are often ignored. The user interface is not well done. If you don't have a GPS lock you can not cycle through the screens, so you can't get to the satellite status screen. On power up you have to be careful not to alter the configuration of the device. It would be nice to get some feedback on the LCD of the size of the track that is recorded.

Many times the GPS signal dropped out of my track and I got several data points in the track that where hundreds of miles from any location I was!

I was not able to get the SD slot to ever work on my 8 GB cards that were formatted on my Canon Rebel. (The docs. suggest formatting the cards on using MS-DOS, but I am a Mac user!) So I had to geotag after the fact.

I would not buy this unit again.

Comments about ATP Electronics GPS PhotoFinder Pro:

A sparse manual made for some interesting set-up issues, but I was able to get it working, or so I thought....

In theory, this thing logs where you are while it is on, then it automatically writes GPS data to the EXIF data in each .JPG (no RAW support). Then when you import the pictures, the GeoTag data is already present.

In reality, the receiver is somewhat week. It's tough to get a signal and keep it. I spent an entire day in New York City and it found a signal twice...ie, two separate records were created a few hours apart..that was it. On the train ride up with the unit pointing at the Sky, I got a few more. If you put your SD card in the unit (it has a slot), it will write whatever data it has for the pictures that were taken when it had data.

If you have a Ccmpact Flash, you're supposed to use the included cables along with a card reader/writer to write the data to the CF. I could never get that to work.

The unit is supposed to be able to export a .KML file to create a log of where you had been, but even though it created a file, it only had a record or two...not quite the 'log' that I had hoped for.

Comments about ATP Electronics GPS PhotoFinder Pro:

I am an Aerial Photographer and need the gps info for my shots. I use all Canon equipment, so I don't have the options available to the Nikon users. The compact size of this unit is nice and the battery life is good. But it does not transfer the information to an external CF reader as promised. In order to transfer the info I needed to load the images onto the computer then to an SD card into the gps devise and then back to the computer.