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Tin-Foil Hat

2008-01-28 21:36:32.680116+00 by ebradway 5 comments

Two fun geoweb items: The first is a farce. The second may become fact: GPS receiver on a chip with extremely low power draw designed for things like automatically geotagging all the pictures in your camera (by basically having the camera constantly track its location).

[ related topics: Photography Maps and Mapping ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: GPS Receiver on a Chip made: 2008-01-28 22:56:34.847102+00 by: jeff

That's cool Eric, and a long time coming! The EXIF metadata standard supports location information for various graphic formats (JPEG, TIFF, etc.). I'm wondering if the same broad support is present in all of the popular RAW image formats (e.g. Canon, Nikon, et al). I believe the support is there.

#Comment Re: made: 2008-01-28 23:05:31.229841+00 by: Dan Lyke

Jeff, I think the RAW image formats are generally getting revamps because the new sensors are kicking out so much more color depth (used to be 10 bits, now I'm hearing 14 bits and more), and I'm sure that, because of that, any that historically haven't had geographical encoding in 'em will soon.

#Comment Re: made: 2008-01-28 23:15:32.980147+00 by: ebradway

The scary bit is that this is a GPS sensor that gets around the "time-to-fix-delay" problem by always being on - at a low-enough power draw not to impact the usability of the camera. Think about other uses besides cameras for such a low-power locational device...

#Comment Re: made: 2008-01-28 23:49:05.236322+00 by: jeff

Dan--yeah, I'm lusting for the Canon 40D in part because of the 14-bit DIGIC chip. I'm holding off for awhile, though, as I have other purchases queued up higher for at least the first half of this year.

#Comment Re: made: 2008-01-29 10:34:03.612274+00 by: DaveP

The support is there in all of today's DSLRs and the newest Raw formats.

But the best solution I've found for on-camera GPS (as opposed to built-in) is still a pretty big battery-pig. Previous generation of chip, though.