manalang

The next big innovation in the digital camera industry has nothing to do with increased mega pixels, larger CCDs, or faster image processors. I think the next big thing in digital photography is GPS technology embedded right into the camera.

This past Summer, I bought a GPS receiver for use with Geocaching. And at some point after that, I began to wonder about the technology and how pervasive it has become with today’s latest automobiles. I like the idea of having a navigation system in my car, but realistically, I probably wouldn’t use it as often as the manufacturer would lead me to believe. Plus, I just hate the idea of something else that can distract me from driving safely — I think DVD players, non-hands free cell phones, and other gizmos that take a driver’s focus away from the responsibility from driving safely should stay out of the car.

Being a digital photography enthusiast, I bring my camera with me almost everywhere I go. I like the idea of being able to capture the moment (whatever moment that is) instantly without the cost of film. Plus, the fact that digital cameras have the ability to record the technical information about a photo is intriguing to me. A few years ago, my wife and I took a six week trip around Europe. Between us, we took close to a thousand photos during the six week excursion. However, at the time, we took our film based SLRs. I discovered many drawbacks to using film even though the photos turned out amazing. One of the biggest drawbacks is not just about not having any technical information about the photos, but also not remembering where some of the photos were taken. After a few years, I pulled the photos back out of the shoe box they’re now kept in. And without immediately tagging and indexing the photos, I can’t recollect where some of them were taken.

Now, consider this — if I had a GPS enabled digital camera at the time, I wouldn’t have to care about tagging and indexing these photos after they’ve been developed. The camera would have created EXIF or IPTC headers that told me not just the technical data about the photos, but also the exact coordinates of where the individual photos were taken. Now imagine if there was a free web service that allowed me to pull in location information based on a set of GPS coordinates. Also, imagine if there was software that allowed you to download location information and add it directly to your photos IPTC headers. The information could be basic city, state/province, or country details or be more detailed information about where you actually were. For example, if I took photos in the Vatican, the service would actually deliver information to me about the Vatican. Now that’s a killer application!

So, I decided to search Google to see if anyone’s thought of this before. And so I find out that my idea isn’t very original. The first hit I got was from Gizmodo pointing to Ricoh’s WiFi/Bluetooth/GPS enabled camera. Oh well, so much for the possibility of being original. However, I do think that many digital cameras will eventually evolve to this. I just hope it happens sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, I’ll settle for a decently priced digital SLR that will allow me to use my Nikkor lenses… the Nikon D70.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2003 at 12:18 PM PST and is tagged with photography, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.