Review on Enhance Your XF205, XF200, XA25, 📷 XA20 Professional Camcorder with Canon GP-E2 GPS Receiver by Tim Ross

Bought in preparation for a trip to China. I'm terrible at documenting where pictures were taken, so I wanted something bulletproof enough. Here are some tips I took away from my experience: 1. When I first got it I turned it on to make sure it worked and then downloaded the latest software from Canon which said it did would fix some bugs. So far, so good. No problems after four weeks on the road.2. It finds a position within minutes of being turned on (longer if a significant portion of the sky is blocked by buildings, such as in Beijing). I figured I'd try to save battery life by reducing the troubleshooting frequency to a few minutes. Misconduct, it is not corrected in a reasonable time. I went back to the default settings and everything works fine.3. I switched to high capacity rechargeable Ni-MH batteries before I left and I had a couple of days of shooting, around 12 hours total, before needing to be recharged. I have activated the camera option to sync the camera clock with the GPS. I mistakenly thought that this would also change the time zone, it doesn't. You still need to change the time zone manually to get the correct timestamp in the photo's Exif data. All my Chinese photos now have "creation date" timestamps that are 15 hours late (although GMT is correct in the GPS exif data). 5. The included map software works fine on Windows 7 (64-bit), but for China there is a discrepancy between the position using the street map and the satellite image. The satellite view is accurate enough, the street map is about a quarter mile away. I'm pretty sure this is a Google Maps issue and not a Canon issue as you can see the same inconsistency in Google Maps rendering of Chinese cities. I have used the mapping software several times to determine which temple I was in or where a photo was taken while cruising the Yangtze. As others have pointed out, the GPS module is quite large. My 70D doesn't fit in any of my camera bags when my device is connected. When switched off, it easily finds a place in your pocket.