Ricoh GPS Ready Camera Hosted on ZooomrRicoh Releases New GPS-Ready Digital Camera Well this is one of the first true GPS equipped digital cameras that I’ve seen yet. There are Garmin and Sony units that synch GPS and some cellphones in Japan doing geolocation tagging, but this is one of the first true cameras of seen.
I’m not sure that I’m ready to trade in the quality of my 5D for auto geotagging, but it’s nice to see these cameras finally coming out on the market.
Eventually look for GPS to be built into virtually every camera as an option.
Waaa! Eventually! I’m not a good photographer as you are, but GPS cameras would really help geaotagging in real time. Maybe a WiFi camera could also directly upload pictures to Zooomr…
I’d like to have GPS, and wifi, and 8 flavors of cell networks, and BlueTooth, and a USB host, and video games, and MP3s, and a pony…
Seriously, having some built-ins is nice. I don’t know why there aren’t more, when GPS can get close to being a $10 chip. But what I probably would really rather have is some expansion slots and at least some rudimentary OS support for a few expansion options. Maybe a pair of co-OSes. One to run the picture-taking properly, and the other being ucLinux that I can hack on to support random hardware devices and other functions.
GPS makes probably the most sense for tight integration, since you want that ready right when you take a shot.
Maybe more realistically, a simple PAN that can have one or more devices feed the camera a current set of EXIF tags (GPS, time sync, what song I’m listening to…), and the camera can send notifications that it just took a shot, light levels, file names, and so on..
Transport could be a few choices. BlueTooth, Firewire, wifi, USB.
Great, now I want to write a camera OS…
I have no doubt that GPS receivers will eventually be built into all digital cameras but at this point, I wouldn’t buy a camera on that feature alone – especially as there are other options for geotagging.
I’ve got a Sony GPS-CS1 GPS logger that I use to record where I’ve been and then later geotag my Canon 5D RAWs and JPGs with.
It was reasonably cheap, takes minimal effort and having location info on all your photos is priceless..
I geotag all of my photos on Flickr and would like GPS integration, but like you, don’t want to give up my Canon 20D.
I wrote about the idea of synchronizing coordinates from your GPS and your camera by time a while back, and then it ocurred to me that someone must have already done it.
A quick Google query found that sure enough someone had.
I think adding GPS to a camera makes it very bulky (the antenna issue). Perhaps Bluetooth is the answer…