Just wondering if anyone has any experience with any of the GPS devices capable of data logging available from Deal Extreme or other similarly (or lower) priced source?

I'm looking for a small battery powered device that I can activate and carry with me while out shooting photos. Later allowing me to dump the data back to a computer for parsing. Either USB or BlueTooth connection to the computer are fine as long as in the end I can get the data I need (directly or through conversion to GPX).

Primarily I shoot with a Nikon D300, but I don't have any desire to get Nikon's own proprietary GPS device which mounts to the hot-shoe and connects directly to the camera. For starters, its tagging is lower precision than the raw data commonly available from most GPS units.

Location data is in my opinion extremely important and valuable data to have with a photograph. Letting one obtain this information without having to remember, or manually record it and then manually input it into photos, is an enormous benefit to achieving this goal. It's a shame we're not seeing GPS built into every camera really. At least every camera where it would be easy to absorb the added cost.

There are a few devices on DealExtreme that may do the trick, but not all of them have reviews. If anyone has an experience with this, I'd love for you to share it.

I suggest an i-Blue 747 logger.

I did some research on chipsets etc when I bought one and it's about ideal for your usage. Cheap & accurate with a fairly long lasting battery.

It has bluetooth too so you can connect phones/laptops etc to it.

There is an oss downloader which supports lots of filters and conversions too. http://www.bt747.org/

HTH

It seems to me that one that connects to your camera would make a lot more sense than having to import that data into your photos after the fact. I guess timestamps would help out a lot, possibly automating the process, but still, extra work.

This thread lists some products. (Not all of them are in the original post.) This seems like the coolest thing to me: Foolography Unleashed, which is a tiny Bluetooth receiver that attaches directly to the camera, allowing you to use any Bluetooth GPS source. It's a little pricey, though, and you still have to have a separate GPS receiver. But it seems to me like the best of both worlds. You don't have to worry about acquisition time or running your camera battery down, and you don't have to worry about extra import steps.

It's definitely a streamlining benefit to get the GPS coords embedded right into the photo at the time of capture, but as mentioned, the firmware on the Nikon cameras, the last I heard, didn't use as much precision as you could get from the GPS logs.

That solution is priced reasonably if you consider it's a hobbyist effort. Crazy expensive if they've sent it off to China to make 5k at a time.

Even with GPS coords within the photos, you're still going to have to do a parsing step. Well, that actually depends on whether you're satisfied with only the coords or not. I'd be running it through software to pick up the coords and then reverse geocode them to find the location names (country, region, city, street), then embed that data as well.

Units that sit on the hot-shoe are not an option, IMO. Too many negatives, including sucking too much battery power (some of them), flimsy cord (all of them) and the biggest issue is they block the pop-up flash. Obviously they also take up the hot shoe, so forget about mounting a remote trigger. Blocking the pop-up flash is a big issue for me because I'm using it as a remote to fire external strobes more and more.

An additional benefit to an external unit is being able to use it with any other camera. That BT receiver thing you linked seems to be the best of all worlds really. I'm just worried about that lack of precision I've read about.

Though oddly enough still cheaper that Nikon's own GPS attachment...

First-party camera accessories are usually insanely priced. Even if they're just a small piece of plastic with no electronics at all. Case in point, lens caps.

One of the hot-shoe mount models mentioned on the DPReview link Bitt posted is only $90 at Amazon right now.

Oh, are you saying that the camera itself doesn't record precise information? I thought you were saying that the Nikon GPS itself wasn't very precise.

To tell you the truth, I'd have to look it up again, because I can't remember. It makes sense to me that it would be the firmware however. I'm not even sure how much prevision was lost, but I remember a couple of threads about it causing some issues with street positioning.

If anyone is interested, a slightly larger Bluetooth dongle for Nikon at $100 shipped: http://www.aokatec.com/HZhost/Product.asp

The one Bitt mentioned, although smaller, is over $230.

The drawback to these devices is that you'll need to buy a new remote release if you use that type of product. The GPS receivers feature a port allowing the connection of a Canon-style remote.

Ok, so I'll find out in a few weeks how well all this stuff works. I bought a Holux logger with the same MTK chipset (with 32 channels) as that i_blue model previously mentioned, along with that AOKA bluetooth receiver. $165 total, shipped. Ordered from two different places, the GPS from Amazon. Had I found the AOKA site earlier I could have gotten everything from there and saved myself $6 or so.

Next I'm going to take a look at some of the photo GPS software for the Mac to both enable me to import the log data and tag photos. For the Nikon images the software will read the coords already in the photos and then reverse geo-code to find the country and city names. For photos from other cameras, it will time-stamp match photos with logged coords, tag the coords and the reverse-geocode stuff to the photos.

Here's a site reviewing a few of the GPS photo programs for Mac OS:
http://trick77.com/2008/07/19/review-geotagging-software-tool-comparison-mac/

Updated: I first tried their recommended GeoPhoto, but I think it sucks. So far, the best (by far) seems to be the commercial version of PhotoLinker, which costs $50. It needs some UI updating, a nicer web site and better screenshots to make it really pop at first glance, but the screencast the author created really helps to sell it. And make it painfully obvious that it's a lot better and has many more features and capabilities than the other programs.

You know what I just thought of (sarcasm)? This would be a nice feature to have in Lightroom. It's probably better externally anyway as Adobe would probably fuck it up.

Got the BTW doohickey for the camera and the GPS data-logger yesterday. Haven't done much testing apart from acquiring a GPS signal, which relatively quick, but I didn't time how long. And I plugged in the BT adapter to the D300. Turn on he camera after the GPS has been turned on and poof, you have GPS data. Browsing the GPS info in the menu shows the coords with interval updates and the current time, pulled from the GPS via bluetooth.

I have to go for a short car trip on Saturday, so I'll try to bring the camera with me and take some snaps. I'll also turn on the logging feature so I can test the tracks against snapped photos with our P&S camera as well.

The worst ever download and software install I've ever been through:

http://www.bt747.org/webinstall