TUMONZ - The Ultimate Map of NZ : v3 Business product reviews

For those who are more interested in the land itself, instead of what sits on top of it, this is by far one of the better options to consider out of the TUMONZ product family. This package gives you access to all of the high-coverage photos, which will give you quite a good idea of the landscape itself, but without the detail that you will get from the high-resolution images. If you are OK with a 'thumbnail sketch' of what the landscape looks like, this is a great middle ground step.

I have a camping spot on the shores of Lake Taupo that I like to visit when the schedule and weather conspire to give me a suitable oppotunity... and I was surprised to study it through an earlier version of TUMONZ a few years ago... back then there were no aerial photos of the region available, and all I could get was a rough idea of the roading and nearby villages. Revisiting it virtually in this version of the map was a surprising thing. Far more detail, plus the addition of the photos gave me a far better idea of the area, and I discovered to my utter horror that the spot on the map I thought was my summer getaway, was in fact nearly a kilometer further around the cove from the ACTUAL spot! Goes to show, eh...

Overall, don't expect to get super-high detail as you zoom in with this package... the fine-detail versions cost a pretty penny more, and are usualy owned by the various regional councils... but when combined with the Property Boundaries module these photos add an extra level of understanding to the map, and could be extremely useful, particularly for hunters, farmers, tourist operators, environmental engineers, etc. Well worth investigating really... especially if you are on a mobile platform and can't get good broadband to use the TUMONZ Live feature of their website.