Significant improvements have been made to Etopo to answer all the concerns I raised in my initial review.  Etopo is produced by Map Connection and is available from Map Town.  At the time of this review, they listed CD's covering all 10 provinces & parts of the territories in 1:250,000 scale. They also list CD's covering 21 selected areas such as Algonquin, Quetico and Vancouver Island in 1:50,000 scale. More titles are being added. The maps themselves are scanned from the official Canadian Government topo maps.

Etopo doesn't come with it's own software for viewing, printing & GPS interface.  However the maps are pre-calibrated for easy use in OziExplorer and the latest version is also calibrated for Fugawi.  Etopo can also be used with other GPS mapping software, though manual calibration of each map will be necessary. As well, the the maps are compatible with many image viewing & editing software packages.

(This paragraph has been inserted by Dale DePriest in Nov 2003 -- The etopo maps company has made a new release and now include a demo map viewer with their products. I believe they have also released many new maps. They also have a new direct web address etopo.ca. All maps are precalibrated for Memory Map, OziExplorer, and Fugawi. They have maps at 1:1,000,000, 1:250,000, and 1:50,000)

Map Connection says that "We have made all the greens, blues and whites the same shade on every map.  The colours are the CMYK numbers as used on the latest government topographic maps."    Image quality is greatly improved.  Colours are even & are uniform from one map to the next.  Map file size has been reduced from around 13 Mbytes to 6 Mbytes, resulting in faster loading from CD.

Each map now has the contour interval on the bottom border.  A mini legend of roads & trails is now included on the bottom border of each map.  As well, a complete legend is in a separate image file. This one is monochrome, just as it is on the back of the current government topos.

I loaded some maps into OziExplorer and checked calibration accuracy at several points, comparing Ozi co-ordinates to the UTM grid printed on the map.  Errors were quite small & probably well within the accuracy of the government originals.

Competing Digital Maps & Software:

Touratech QV:  QV map files are somewhat smaller and load faster than Etopo.  The maps themselves look almost identical to Etopo, though there is some variation in colour from map to map.  Touratech QV software includes demo GPS interface software that can be activated for a fee.  For GPS use though, I prefer OziExplorer. It accepts QV maps & calibration files, though not as smoothly as it handles Etopo, but I find it much more intuitive and powerful than Touratech's own software, and cheaper than the activation fee for Touratech's GPS interface.

SoftMap: This package's feature is the viewer, which seamlessly stitches the maps together on screen, so that there are no map boundaries. You can follow a river for hundreds of kilometers from source to mouth without switching maps. Very large areas can be printed out onto multiple sheets of paper.  However I found the user interface less intuitive than either QV or OziExplorer.  The maps themselves are lower resolution than the other products, not as readable & are in a proprietary format that can't be used with other software, except by copying the current window to the clipboard.  I didn't test the GPS interface and have been told that it is quite limited.

Fugawi http://www.fugawi.com/  :  Fugawi has their own line of CD topo maps & software.   However, they recognized a good thing & provided Map Connection with a conversion program to convert Etopo calibration files into Fugawi calibration files.  So owners of Fugawi software can use either company's maps.

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