The ATP Photo Finder mini is ATP's latest envisioning of their unique combination of GPS logger and hardware-based photo geocoding. This preview is just a "first light" overview of the logger component. Unlike the original Photo Finder, there are now two pieces to the product: a small SIRFstar III GPS data logger, and a separate larger unit which serves as a sort of base station, and which takes the camera memory cards to combine with the logger's data in order to geocode the photos.
The GPS logger component has some nice features: it mounts as a USB storage device (including on the Mac) and stores its data as regular NMEA 0183 files.
Additionally, and AFAIK uniquely in this class of logger, it uses a memory card rather than internal memory - so if you want to record more hours of GPS tracks, just get a larger MMC card.
The Mac compatibility (I used Mac OS X 10.4.10) and ease of use put the GPS logger component of the mini in the same class as the AGL3080.
I did a quick test of it on the bus, it was pretty good under open sky, but it got very jaggedy in urban canyon downtown. (I was walking in a straight line down Albert and then turned onto Kent.) The gap in the middle of the larger map is (I think) when I was in a tunnel (it stopped the logging and started a new log file after.)
The above Google Earth tracks were made by just copying the files from the logger and using GPSvisualizer.com to convert them.
Just to re-emphasize, this is a hardware-only photo geocoding solution. The above looks just at the GPS logger component, but the separate base station which I didn't examine is used to do the geocoding, the logger docks with it and then you insert your camera's memory card and adjust some settings and push a button and it's automatic from there.
I will talk about everything that's in the box (in particular, the base station) and do a full review later.
Disclosure: ATP provided this unit to me for evaluation purposes.
The new mini is not available on Amazon yet. If you want to check out ATP's previous generation of this technology, a combined logger-card reader-geocoder called just the ATP Photo Finder, you can see it at Amazon.com, and there's also info at http://photofinder.atpinc.com/
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