Sony’s Photo Location Tracker

With digital camera ownership having long since overtaken the procession of manual cameras, and with storage memory card costs at an all time low, it has never been easier to snap happily away at everything and anything as you go about your life knowing that you can always dispose of imagery no longer required at a later date.

One of the repercussions of this is that we can often find ourselves in a position where by a particular image has become rather disassociated with the location from where it was captured. For instance, you have a charming picture of a leaf being tossed around by the wind in a gutter but, having taken hundreds of photos on the same SD card since, you now have no idea where this particular shot was taken.

Thanks to the boffins at Sony, we now have a gadget that will recall exactly where we were at the time a given image was captured and, furthermore, it will even allow placement of the location in question on a map.

The concept behind Sony’s GPS-CS1 unit is, in essence, so simple it’s brilliant. The unit simply acts to log your location at intervals of 15 seconds so that, when a photo is taken using a compatible Sony digital camera, the supplied software can act to estimate the location at which the photo was captured based on extrapolating the data stored on the GPS unit immediately before and immediately after the image’s capture time. Of course, whilst working on this basis the supplied location may not be accurate to the nearest millimetre, the fact that the points measured are based on a mere 15 second interval means that the supplied location is going to be accurate enough for all but the most exacting of people.

Specifications:

• Operating Temperature - 101.6 x 152.4mm (4″ x 6″)
• Storage Temperature - -20 to +60 degrees C (-4 to +140 degrees F)
• USB Port(s) - USB 2.0 Full Speed Power Consumption (in Operation) — 0.3W
• Battery Life (Approx.) - 10 to 14 Hours
• Frequency Response - 1575.42 MHz (L1 Band, C/A code)
• User Memory Capacity - 31MB
• Supported Formats - Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional/ Millennium Edition/ XP Home Edition/XP Professional
• Supplied Accessories - GPS Unit, Carabiner, USB cable, CD-ROM (GPS Image Tracker) & Cleaning Cartridge
• Camera Compatibility - compatible with Cyber-shot DSC-S500, S600, S45, W30, W50, W70, W100, H2, H5, T30 and Sony α (alpha) DSLR-A100.

The Sony GPS-CS1 retails in the region of $129-149 dependent on source. More information can be gained from Sony’s site via this link.