Customer Reviews

Nikon GP-1 GPS Unit for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Picked this up for my wife for our current trip to Hong Kong and Vietnam (we're in Vietnam at the moment) and I just couldn't wait to get back to write this review.

The good:

- It adds GPS data to your photos.
- 3 indicators of GPS quality (red, flashing green - accurate, solid green - most accurate).

The bad:

- The sync time is so bad as to make this unusable. It takes minutes to sync, even outside. Get a full "solid green" sync, power off the unit, power it back on and it can take several minutes to sync.
- It only works outdoors. And by outdoors I mean a completely unobstructed view of the skies. Don't hold your hand over it, not in a car, train, bus or standing just inside a window or under a tree - outside straight up to the stars.
- Popup flash does not work when the GPS unit is attached to the hot shoe (not enough clearance for it to rise).

Our experience:

The very first thing you'll do is disable AF-S auto enable/disable meaning that GPS unit will always draw power even when the camera is on and you're not shooting. Why? Because if it's auto on/off with AF-S, it will turn on and off constantly, never syncing up.

The very second thing you'll do is stop turning your camera on and off when you're not shooting. My wife had to train herself to negate one of her favourite things about D-SLRs - instant on/off, because every time she powered off the body, it would take forever to re-sync when she wanted another quick snapshot a few minutes later. And this was outside! Be prepared to bring extra batteries (my wife and I have 4 among our two bodies).

I'm eBay'ing this as soon as we get home. HUGE disappointment.

Somehow every cell phone in existence can get GPS inside of a house and car, yet this dedicated $200 device which costs the same or more than some cellphones with GPS (like the iPhone) can't do its one thing well. Color us disappointed :-(

Please, don't reward Nikon by buying this. It's terrible.

I bought this unit to allow me to geotag photos from an upcoming trip to the Grand Canyon in a couple of weeks and to the Dominican Republic later. I attached it to the shoe mount of my D-90 first, and then to the shoulder-strap mount (included). From a cold start right out of the box, it locked on to at least 3 satellites (solid green indicator) within 30 seconds. Afterward, it required no more than 2-3 seconds to get a locked.

It records latitude & longitude (d-m-s), elevation (m), and UTC date/time. I examined the test photos using the Geotag feature of Nikon's View NX photo browser, which connects to Google Map / Satellite. The tag was within 10 feet (if not exactly on) of the spot where I snapped the photos.

Update: After several days of use, I'm very pleased with this device. However, be aware that the unit is powered by the camera's battery. There are two power modes - ALWAYS ON (as long as the camera is on) & AUTO METER OFF, where the GPS shuts off with the automatic shutdown of the camera's exposure meters (to preserve battery life). The downside to the AUTO METER OFF mode is that you have the give the GPS time to re-acquire a satellite lock before it will tag your photos (in most cases, a few seconds). Because of this, I like to set it for always on - I want it to be ready to tag whenever I'm ready to shoot. The downside of this is if you forget to turn your camera off when you're not shooting, the GPS will drain your battery. In other words, be sure to have a fully charged second battery.

I have been waiting for this product to come available since I bought my Nikon D90 the first week it was released. I expected this GPS to be similar to other GPS devices I have, ie, my phone, car, and even a USB GPS unit that plugs into my computer (I used it before I got a car that had one built in). I am sadly disappointed in its performance.

I hooked up the unit and turned it on. It never received a signal within the house, blinking red the whole time (which was expected). However, when I took it to my deck, which has an open unobstructed view of the sky, it took it over 80 seconds to get a solid green light (meaning connected to 3+ satellites). 2 seconds later, it starts blinking green (meaning connected to 2 satellites, less accurate). Then it turned solid green again. I placed my hand over the top of it - not touching it - and within 5 seconds, it was blinking red (no satellites). I'm of the opinion that this GPS is not of the same caliber as a typical GPS - and what is frustrating is that I did PAY a LOT more than a typical GPS!!

Shouldn't I expect it to get a signal and keep it longer? Even my car GPS would get a signal within 20 seconds! My fear is that if I'm walking a park and get underneath a tree, it'll lose it's signal altogether and those pictures will not be properly tagged. I guess it's good for those "open field" pictures.

Very disappointed - better than nothing, but not by much.

I bought my Nikon D-90 camera 8 months ago as my first digital SLR purchase. I was thrilled when the GP-1 attachment was released, and soon purchased it for geotagging fun. On the very first trip we took it on, we ended up spending 45 minutes sitting outside a cafe waiting for it to pick up a satellite signal. Keep in mind that this was an open plaza on a sunny day. Finally we gave up and started walking around taking pictures. About three blocks away it finally picked up a signal, so we walked back along our route taking duplicate pictures with the GPS data.

Annoying, but not insurmountable. Fast forward to our most recent trip, when we took the D-90 and GP-1 out of our carry-on bag only to find that the D-90 would no longer recognize or power the GP-1. A diagnosis revealed that the GP-1 cable which stuck out at a 90 degree angle had gotten jostled and damaged the GPS port on my camera. Many phone calls to Nikon later, I was told that any repairs to the GPS port on our camera would not be covered under warranty. My local camera repair shop is now charging $285 (more than the original purchase price of the GP-1) to repair the GPS port in my D-90 that was damaged by the GP-1 cable. This is extremely poor design on Nikon's part, and needs to be recalled or included in the warranty coverage.

I do enjoy geotagging the pictures from my D-90, but will try to find a brace to prevent tugs on the GP-1 cable from damaging the D-90's port. Failing that, I can expect to pay further installments of $285 as the price of using the GP-1.

I recently purchased this item. It works ok, but is overpriced when compared to generic GPS systems that used the exact same chipset.

Now that is not why I am giving this product such a bad review. I am giving it a bad review because the design of this GPS when used with a Nikon D-90 was poorly done. It is not obvious from the stock images, but the cable for this GPS on the D-90 sticks out of the side of the camera at a 90 degree angle to the body. The plug head is about 3 inches long and it plugs into a very small port on the side of the camera. None of this would be a serious issue if you kept your camera on a tripod when you were shooting.

Unfortunately, most people that want to geotag photos want to do so because they are moving around. This means that the plug you need to use for the GPS on a D-90 is a large protruding item from the side of your camera that is likely to be bumped. In my case, being very careful to protect that plug from being bumped, it was still moved enough to damage my pretty new camera. This is clearly a case where the people designing the GPS cable didnt consider how the camera would be used for the accessory being sold.

Don't buy this product unless Nikon changes the design. It is pretty expensive to start with and poses a real significant risk of damaging your camera with normal use.

I recently purchased a Nikon D90 and thought the Nikon GP-1 GPS unit would be the perfect complement to round out my accessory package. I purchased it in Japan for about 19,800 JPY (tax included) at a local electronics shop, which was quite a bit cheaper than the U.S. pricing. There were better prices on the internet from Japanese dealers (as low as 17,800 JPY (tax included) on Amazon.co.jp), but I wanted to walk out of the store with it and put it to use right away. Here is what I discovered:

PROS:
1. Affordable price for the information it can embed into your photos.
2. No fees whatsoever for link-up with the satellites.
3. Very lightweight, allowing you to pack it wherever you go, without a second thought.
4. Easy to mount onto the hot shoe.
5. System setup is a snap.
6. Fairly fast link-up with 5 satellites (within about a minute the lamp becomes solid green) This can be a CON however, during cold startups (see below).
7. Accurate tracking performance to within about 100 meters or less of the actual shooting location with a solid green lamp (flashing green will be less accurate).
CONS:
1. Poor design in that they SHOULD have made the fixed plastic mount for the hot shoe slide bracket a little longer, with swivel mechanism between the GP-1 head and the fixed plastic mount. If they did, you could tilt the GP-1's head back slightly when you want to activate the flash, while still maintaining the satellite syncs. With the present design, the flash is completely disabled with the GP-1 mounted to the hot shoe (the flash flips halfway up and slams right into the head of the GPS). In my view a very nearsighted thought process went into the design. As a workaround, they give you a separate strap adapter that will allow you to mount the GP-1 to the camera strap (this is why the cord is so long). The problem with this idea is that when the GP-1's head is horizontal (hanging on your strap) it either does not pick up or keeps dropping the satellite signals, making it a totally useless workaround.
2. The cord that connects the GP-1 to the camera will easily snag things. The best thing to do is to loop the cord a couple of times to make the loop smaller.
3. To conserve battery life, Nikon recommends that you shut the exposure meters off when you purchase the GP-1. This is done during setup by turning "GPS> Auto Meter/off". However, for about 3 hours, even with the exposure meters off and the camera off, power is periodically supplied to the GPS to enable it to track your location. Of course, if you have your camera in a bag or if the GP-1's head is not pointing to the sky, it will not be able to sync with the satellites anyway. What all this means is that each time you want to pull out your camera to take a photo, it is termed a "cold start", and you may need to wait for up to a minute before getting satellite positioning data for your photo. This can be a real hassle. Thankfully, with the long battery life, if you just leave the camera on you have a pretty good chance of having a sync when you are ready to shoot. If you are on an extended trip, you may want to take along your battery charger or an extra battery just in case to cover the GP-1's power drain.

Overall, I am pretty happy with the GP-1 GPS unit, and hope Nikon will make the mount longer with a swivel mechanism in the next release so that you can use the flash at the same time as the GPS-1. It should be pretty easy to achieve this, and effort may be made in this direction with enough customer feedback.

This product simply did not function. I used the GPS-1 on a 15 day motorcycle trip around the NW United States and the unit found the location only once. The unit was used in extremely open areas and was given 30 minutes to register the location with no success. I would not recommend the product. Matter of fact, I have return my unit for a refund.

I've owned two other GPS units for my D300, and although it has a few issues, the Nikon GP1 is far and away the best.

First and foremost, it's rugged and high quality. I don't think I'm rough on my equipment, but I went through two other (non-Nikon) units in under a year. So far the Nikon is holding up well.

The GP-1 does take a while to acquire satellites...I'd say for me it's typically around 15 seconds. Sometimes it works indoors, sometimes it doesn't. I don't notice a big difference in this regard between the Nikon and other brands I've tried. But unlike one of my other (non-Nikon) GPS units, I never get false signals - if the coordinates are recorded, they are correct.

I tend to keep the GP-1 mounted to my camera strap (I like the Crumpler - the GPS fits on it well) and I tend to leave it connected all the time. I tend not to turn the camera on and off between shots, and as others have pointed out, it does drain the battery at a good clip. I use the MB-D10 battery grip with my D300...it has a larger battery and this helps a lot. I tend to get about 1200 pictures per charge with the GPS on (but the flash typically off).

Only other complaint is that the GP-1 creates a little contention for the 10-pin port on the camera. Sometimes I use a Nikon MC-36 (remote control) whilch also requires the 10-pin connector, and it would be nice if there were a built-in way to chain the devices together. Yes, I've seen various "Y" adapters, but I haven't had luck with them - they tend to create an unwieldy tangle of wires that I'm always catching things on. I guess I'm also wondering why Nikon doesn't just build GPS into the camera itself, as they do with one of their point-and-shoots. Hopefully the next design.

Recommended.

UPDATE: February 2010

I recently tried Apple's latest version of Aperture (3.0), and for some reason, it doesn't understand the GPS coordinates embedded in my D300's RAW files. Not sure if this is a problem with the GP-1 or a bug in Apple's software, but the two don't seem to work together well.

I've had my GP-1 for almost a year now, and recently got my D90 body back from the repair shop due to a problem from the GP-1 attachment. The cable that connects the GP-1 to the camera is very poorly designed - it over stresses the connection jack where it attaches to the camera. After several months of use (not very heavy use, either), the connection became intermittent then finally failed. Luckily both the D90 body and the GP-1 were still under warranty, and the replacement of the D90 interface board was covered. I hate to think how much that would have cost otherwise.

Hopefully, Nikon will redesign this cable; I've heard of others having this problem as well. The D300 attachment should be fine; it's a much more heavy duty connection plug. It wouldn't be hard to make a better cable, but the Nikon web site still shows this bad design as the replacement part.

There is another D90 related problem - when mounted to the flash shoe, the GP-1 sticks out far enough so that it blocks the built in flash from popping up all the way. True, there are parts included so that the GP-1 can be attached to the camera strap, but this suggests that Nikon rushed this into production too soon.

I'm giving it a grudging two stars, even though it doesn't deserve it. When working, it does what it's supposed to and that's very useful. But Nikon apparently didn't even do the most basic user testing across the camera bodies that support this. This is not even a 1.0 level product.

To temper some of the extreme reviews on this piece, I thought I would contribute my experiences. It is slow to attain its first lock when activated (especially indoors) but once it is able to establish a lock it behaves reasonably smoothly. Turning it on inside a three story building, it failed to lock when I first connected it. Walking outside to test it, it located its position within about 1 minuted. Afterward, returning inside the building it locked within 20 seconds where it had previously failed.

Further testing showed that it is slow during heavy weather taking again, around a minute to lock. It also failed to attain a first lock when I was walking at a moderate pace. However, pausing for around a minute for it to lock and then moving on to shoot at some distance from the original location proved that it would maintain its position accurately relatively quickly-- five seconds or less. This matches with reasonable accuracy Nikon's published data on the piece.

All in all, the slowness was only a moderate inconvenience. For the moderate price/size it seems well worth it to me.