By David Ponce
I just came across the Ricoh Pro G3, announced last January. I thought y’all might want to hear about one cool feature I haven’t seen on other cameras yet: it’s compatible with the GlobalSat BC337, a GPS module that embeds the exact location the picture was taken, directly into the file.
Let me first say, this is not a camera for aspiring photographers, or anyone looking for some serious graphical detail, as it sports a relatively meek 3.24MP and a 3X digital zoom. Instead, it’s aimed squarely at businesses and governments interested in the camera’s potential uses.
The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has used the camera to record recent storm damage. U.S. National Park workers have used the cameras to document land growth and defilement. Engineers and farmers have used the camera in their surveying.
To further make the point that businesses should be buying these, Ricoh’s priced it at $870 by itself. Coupled with a the CompactFlash GPS card, it sells for $950. If a GPS-Photo Link Ricoh Edition Software package is thrown in with that, it goes for $1,149.
VIA [Gizmologia]
You don’t have to have this camera — there’s a way to do this with any digital camera and a GPS. The World Wide Media Exchange is a project of Microsoft Research. They’ve got some free tools on their web site, including the WWMX Location Stamper, which you can download from their web site at http://wwmx.org/Download.aspx. Here’s how it works. You go out and take some pictures, and you have your GPS with you recording a track log. When you get home, you run this location stamper program, point it at a directory of photos, and also feed it the saved GPS track log. The photos have the time stamp that says when they were taken, and the GPS track log knows exactly where you were at that point in time. This program combines the two and inserts the correct geotag data into each photo. There are some other tools on that web site as well, for creating map pages, etc.
The new Nikon D200 supports plugging in a GPS and adding GPS data to the JPG headers. Although, it’s a bit more pricy than the Ricoh.