Comments

1. Scott A. Byrd says:

   February 20, 2010 at 4:56 pm

   I’ve owned a Nikon 200 for about three years and, when I pur­chased the cam­era, wanted a GPS unit to enable me to geolo­cate my pho­tos. My first incli­na­tion was to pur­chase Nikon’s unit but bud­get, dis­trac­tions of life, and a few early reviews caused me to post­pone that deci­sion. When the notion recurred to me to pur­chase a GPS unit, one of the units that came up on the radar screen was the Pro­mote Sys­tems GPS-N-1. After read­ing through many reviews for dif­fer­ent receivers, I decided to pur­chase this unit. It arrived within a week of my hav­ing placed the order (via Ama­zon).

   I live in Vienna, Vir­ginia (about 20 miles out­side of Wash­ing­ton, DC) and all of my tests to date have been pos­i­tive. From a cold start, the unit gen­er­ally acquires satel­lite lock within 30 sec­onds and will get more accu­rate as more time passes. The LAT/LON coor­di­nates that it places into a photo’s meta­data fields are quite accu­rate. As it receives its power from the camera’s bat­tery, it will short­ern the charge. How­ever, my qual­i­ta­tive tests to date have not indi­cated that the load to the camera’s bat­tery is exces­sive. (The bat­tery I am using in the cam­era is a Nikon EN-EL3e recharge­able Li-Ion.)

   Phys­i­cally, the unit’s case is made of durable plas­tic, and the mount­ing screw that secures it to the camera’s hot-shoe, which does pre­clude use of the D200’s pop-up flash is firm. A short cable con­nects this unit to the D200’s 10-pin con­nec­tor, and this is unob­tru­sive and does not inter­fere with shoot­ing. The unit comes with a felt-type bag with draw­strings and eas­ily fits into my cam­era bag, a Lowe­Pro Sling­shot 200 AW.

   Oper­a­tion has thus far been depend­able and nearly trans­par­ent. If the unit con­tin­ues to per­form as it has, I will be very happy. The cost may, at first glance, appear to be a tad expen­sive. How­ever, a seri­ous pho­tog­ra­pher will likely con­sider the cost a worth­while expen­di­ture when con­sid­er­ing what the unit pro­vides. Over­all, I would rec­om­mend this prod­uct (and have already done so) to my friends and asso­ciates.
   Rat­ing: 5 / 5
2. Tuna Ertemalp says:

   February 20, 2010 at 6:31 pm

   I was about to get Nikon’s GP-1 GPS unit, but then saw this listed on Ama­zon in addi­tion to read­ing the bad reviews on GP-1, and decided to go with it. I am glad I chose Promote.

   The ini­tial loca­tion fix when I first con­nected every­thing was about a minute. Since then, it takes about 3–4 sec­onds when I turn on the camera.

   The ini­tial fix was done on my patio, with the sky above me. Then it con­tin­ued to work indoors. My portable car nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem doesn’t find any satel­lites when I bring it indoors, but this lit­tle unit does. Must be the new chipset in it. Yay!

   As the review title sug­gests, one lit­tle sur­prise was the clip that was in the box. In many reviews peo­ple were com­plain­ing about tak­ing up the hot­shoe space etc., and need­ing to come up with a DYI way of clip­ping the unit to the strap when flash was in use. Well, I just threaded the strap through the sup­plied clip, and the unit attaches to it like it goes onto the hot­shoe, safe and secure. So, either peo­ple missed the small flat clip at the bot­tom of the prod­uct box, hid­den UNDER the small man­ual, or this is some­thing new that Pro­mote started includ­ing. No mat­ter what, it shouldn’t be a con­cern anymore.

   This is now all work­ing on my fresh new D3s. I have set my D3s to power the GPS at all times, instead of just dur­ing AF. But, the unit has its own on/off but­ton, so I turn it off when I don’t want it to draw power (like when I am at home shoot­ing friends & fam­ily; I know what the inside of our house looks like with­out hav­ing the GPS data). Given the juice that is in the EN-EL4a, I am not worried.

   Highly rec­om­mended…
   
   Rat­ing: 5 / 5
3. P. P. Wilson says:

   February 20, 2010 at 8:17 pm

   I ordered this from Ado­rama via Ama­zon , so it got from NY to New Zealand in just a bit over 3 days. I should have paid less for freight ( USD 76 or 116 NZD or half a days work for white mid­dle class Joe’s ) and let it take a week.
   
   Unit is what I wanted and was hope­ful of get­ting. About 15 sec­onds to get a fix from cam­era power up. Even with the freight, this has got to be incred­i­ble value. Well done, gush gush.
   Rat­ing: 5 / 5
4. Mr Cool says:

   February 20, 2010 at 10:22 pm

   As some­one already noted, this unit DOES NOT work with Nikon D90. How­ever, they just came out with a model that indeed DOES work with D90: the GPS-N90. It’s basi­cally the same thing except it is D90 com­pat­i­ble. As of this writ­ing it is still not in stock any­where that I could find, but it should be out soon.
   Rat­ing: 5 / 5
5. Jason K. Nakrani says:

   February 20, 2010 at 10:56 pm

   I have been using the GPS for about an hour and it is work­ing great. I took the cam­era and gps out­side for it to get its first lock. I have 3 dif­fer­ent GPS’s sim­i­lar to this and the only down­side to all of them is that hey do not work well indoors.

   It is over­cast with some rain today and it locked in 30 sec­onds when I went outside.

   - Jason
   Rat­ing: 5 / 5

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