Dave Etchells, Publisher, Imaging Resource: We had a number of readers, also, asking about GPS, and why you can attach a GPS receiver, but people are saying why wasn’t GPS built into the camera?

Toshiaki Akagi: We always have a GP-1 GPS accessory, then we want to use a GP-1, and if we include a GPS function in the camera, the camera would be bigger. And GPS still has a little problem, so for example indoors, we cannot get GPS data, then we are considering now to adapt the GPS to the next model, in the future. While you are indoors, the performance is not stable, so that’s why we gave up to install the function in the body as of now.

There is more, so read the rest at imaging-resource.com (found via nikonrumors.com).]]> http://www.foolography.com/2012/01/23/nikon-interview-questions-about-gps/feed/ 0 http://www.foolography.com/2012/01/19/nikon-d4-gps-with-unleashed-d200/ http://www.foolography.com/2012/01/19/nikon-d4-gps-with-unleashed-d200/#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:24:49 +0000 Oliver Perialis http://www.foolography.com/?p=1183 We were at PMA@CES, exhibiting our products. On a slow morning I wandered over to the CES, heading straight to the Nikon booth. After admiring the D4 for a while, I seized the opportunity, to gather proof for everyone, that our Unleashed D200+ is compatible with the D4. I took my favorite GPS, which managed to keep a fix even inside the Convention Center hall and plugged an Unleashed into the D4. It fits beautifully.

After 3 seconds, the Unleashed had connected to the GPS, and the GPS icon on the LCD lit up:

Took a photo, and what do you know: it’s geotagged with our location in Las Vegas!

View Larger Map

So there you go: Proof that our Unleashed D200+ is fully compatible with the new Nikon D4!

PS. I went to see Canon’s GP-E1, which they announced 3 months ago! They did not have one with them! Can you believe it? I certainly couldn’t! On top of that, no-one at the booth had any knowledge about it, other than having heard it exists.

We are excited to be part of this year’s PMA@CES trade show in Las Vegas from January 10-13th. As part of the German Pavilion, we will exhibit our latest products. If you are planning on going, have a look at the floor plan from the official CES website which is much better than the one from PMA. You can find us in the Venetian, Hall D, Booth 72218. We hope to see some of you there! there

As a PMA@CES special we will prolong our current Xmas offer until the end of January. For every order of one of our Unleasheds (D200+, Dx000, D90) you get a Visiontac VGPS-500 receiver FOR FREE or you can donate to a charitable organisation! Get more information here or check it out in our online shop.

*Special note: This post was published mid-air, on our flight to Vegas. How cool is that? Thanks Ford, for sponsoring 30 free minutes of gogo internet for everyone!

I won’t go over the spec’s again, you can read those on dpreview.com, engadget or any other gear-site. One thing you might not read much about on other sites, are its GPS capabilities:

The Nikon D4 does not have built-in GPS. This might be unbelievable to some people, but I completely understand Nikon’s decision. Yes, there are plenty of other cameras that have built-in GPS, and that cost a fraction of the D4. But before I’ll try to give you some pointers as to why Nikon might have decided against GPS functionality. But first, the good news:

Our Unleashed D200+ is compatible with the Nikon D4

That means that you’ll have the possibility of adding what some people call “the next best thing to built-in GPS”, but we consider it to be even better than built-in GPS: our tiny Bluetooth Module on the camera, connected wirelessly to an external GPS of your choice. You can choose the GPS you prefer, whether it’s the cheapest you can find, or a sub-meter Trimble or Leica GPS that may well be worth more that the camera itself. And the greatest advantage: you can easily upgrade that GPS without having to upgrade the whole system.

So that is one of the key reasons why I wouldn’t want my high-end camera to have GPS built-in. But back to Nikon and their reasons not to build it in: Many people argue that it’s a feature that only a small portion of photographers would want that feature, but everyone would have to pay for it, so the additional cost is not feasible for features 90% of the customers won’t use. I don’t believe it! If that were true, there would never be any new features in new cameras, and there would certainly be no Ethernet port on the D4 – would there? Are you going to use that?

I believe they had technical reasons, which I’ve explained many times before: The D4 is a professional camera. It is aimed at professionals, who extreme demands on their equipment. They will not accept a half-baked solution, that works “most of the time” or is “relatively accurate”. No, they demand perfect solutions, and if they get anything else, you’ll be sure to hear a lot of complaints. Fact is: GPS receivers that are any good, require an extremely sensitive Antenna. The problem is that a camera as complex as the D4 has a lot of electronics that will definitely generate a lot of noise. Electronics manufacturers have problems getting those noise levels low enough to pass tests for FCC, CE or other regulatory certification. Obviously, this noise will interfere with that extremely sensitive Antenna. Until they figure out a solution to that problem, they’ll either need to sacrifice sensitivity of the antenna, or make compromises in other parts of the camera. Or, they get their best engineers to work on this problem… But then again, who is going to work on the core features of the next cameras?

They’ll figure it out eventually, but it’s not as easy as it seems to everyone who’s gotten used to really fast, fairly precise GPS on their iPhone. Technically, that’s almost entirely thanks to wifi and cellular network connectivity. The GPS is just refining that position. If you don’t believe me, try getting a position in a place where you don’t have any reception, and there’s no wifi nearby. There’s as good as no chance that will work.

Anyway, now that the D4 is announced, and we’ll confirm that our Unleashed will work, when we’ll test it at CES in Las Vegas in a few days, make use of our special offer, and get a free GPS when you purchase an Unleashed D200+.

One FREE GPS receiver by Visiontac!

Alternatively, if you do not want the free Visiontac VGPS-500 (e.g. you prefer to buy one of our Holux receivers or already own a compatible GPS receiver), we will donate 20€ of your purchase to the charitable NEHEMIA Foundation in Albania.

Further information here.

At PMA 2010 foolography presented its Unleashed Barcode Edition and won the DIMA 2010 Innovative Digital Product Award as well as the Pro Photographer Hot Pick and Retailer Hot Pick awards. The Unleashed Barcode Edition enables photographs to wirelessly connect a Barcodes scanner to the camera and save a numeric barcode directly to the EXIF data of your photos. This is a huge time-saver for volume photographers and is the most elegant solution out there, available for the entire current Nikon DSLR lineup! We finally started worldwide sales of the Unleashed Barcode Edition excluding USA and Canada (where we are still resolving a patent issue).

Find more info on the Unleashed Barcode Edition product page.

Purchase it directly in our Barcode Edition Shop.

We are pleased to announce that B&H now carries our wireless geotagging products, and currently has all versions of our Unleashed stocked, as well as all available bundles with the Holux GPS receivers we also carry.

Buy foolography products at B&H.

While we still ship worldwide, and will still gladly take your orders in our online-shop, B&H will offer many more payment options, quicker shipping to US-Customers, and of course an unparalleled range of photography gear, so you can save shipping costs by purchasing everything there.

Canon has just announced their new flagship DSLR, the EOS 1D X And the big news is that they have finally decided to add two (or rather one and a half) GPS accessories to their product lineup along with it: the GP-E1 and the WFT-E6A:

Images via dpreview.com

The GP-E1 is a dedicated GPS Unit, and the WFT-E6 is a wireless file transmitter. However, it seems Canon liked our Idea with the Bluetooth GPS connectivity, and so decided to add that functionality into the WFT-E6. Unfortunately, both devices are compatible only with the new EOS 1D X, and won’t work with previous generation cameras. Although much smaller than the WFT-E2, both these add-ons are still much bigger than our Unleashed. Oh, and the pricing is supposed to be $300 and $600 respectively, plus the $6800 for the camera you’ll need to be able to use those accessories ;-)

Who knows what we’ll be able to come up with!?

So, as rumored, Nikon released the D5100 today – the successor to their D5000, the mid-level consumer DSLR, positioned between the D3100 and the D7000.

I won’t tell you about the details or technical specifications, you can read about those elsewhere, such as on dpreview.com. But here’s what will interest our readers:

Our Unleashed Dx000 will fit on the Nikon D5100!!

D5100 GPS port (dpreview.com)

It will even fit in such a way, that it will hardly get in your way when you tilt and swivel the display through typically used orientations.

So that’s what happens when your products are written about in the news section of dpreview.com (first peak) and on engadget.com, nikonrumors.com, etc (second peak).

We sure enjoyed our 15 minutes of fame :-)

We’ve started a page of previous mentions in the press, which we will update with more and more links to articles and reviews that were written about foolography.