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Comment by alecdibble | Hacker News Reader

While GPS chips might seem like an obvious addition, it might negatively affect other camera functions like battery life.

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That has massive import/export implications, changes how you can ship them, all sorts of nonsense. As always, when a group of hundreds of smart engineers are doing something superficially inexplicable, it's actually either:

a) complicated, and a good idea, or b) complicated, because of the government.

I don't accept that. Many cameras, even some cheap point-and-shoot cameras, do include GPS receivers. I have an old Canon Powershot S100 with GPS that was sold all over the world for less money than a smartphone. So obviously the import/export and shipping implications aren't that massive. There's no valid reason to exclude that feature from DSLRs any more.

> I don't accept that.

For a start you need to deal with the laws in China. They apply not only to items sold in China, but also to items brought into the country (eg by customers). Economies of scale make this easier with widely sold products, and more painful for low volume products (higher cost of implementation per unit sold). Repeat for laws in other countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...

My point and shoot from a few years ago had two pages in the manual covering the builtin GPS usage in China.

c) to improve profit margins at customer UX expense.

Many cameras have had GPS modules and none have suffered from this problem.

It's easily solved by polling infrequently (you don't move a lot when taking photos) and only polling when you're actually using your camera.

GPS can be turned off.

GPS based on solely on satellite signals tends to require several to tens of minutes before it can provide an accurate location. Cell phone geolocation tends to much much faster because it utilizes terrestrial radio signals from cell towers and wifi networks and who knows what else...a database of such signals is part of the what else.

My old point-and-shoot camera with a built-in GPS receiver can go from completely powered off (battery out) to an accurate GPS fix in under 4 minutes as long as it has an unobstructed view of the sky. So your time estimate is way too high in most cases.

Cell phones are even faster because they pick up an initial approximate location from the cell phone tower and also automatically download GPS satellite ephemeris data.

To me, four minutes seems to fall in the range of "several to tens of minutes."

Sorry, I misread your earlier comment.

Laptops (and phones) use the mac addresses of nearby wifi networks to approximate location (especially inside buildings where GPS signal is low.)

Though it requires an internet connection an online database to actually compute the location. So, probably not as useful for a camera.

skyhookwireless.com is one example of a wifi location database.

Erm, my Garmin GPSMAP 64 can get a fix after a reboot in about one second. And if I didn't boot it in a few months it takes 15 seconds tops.

You are thinking of very old and very crappy GPSes.

Today GPSes not only get a fix very quickly, but don't even use much battery. My Garmin records tracks continuously through daylight for several days until I have to replace the two AA batteries.

[1] https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/140020

Thanks. I'd expect better performance out of bespoke hardware than a camera feature. That's why if GPS was really something I wanted, I'd get a handheld GPS because it's less than the bulk and weight of many lenses.

An accurate GPS receiver literally weighs a few grams now. I have one in my wristwatch. Weight and bulk aren't valid reasons to leave GPS out of cameras.

I don't disagree. For me, if I really cared about GPS, I would buy a GPS and drop it in a pocket. I would not tie a camera decision to its availability or unavailability because GPS does not really affect how I rate the quality of my photographs. On the other hand, if I was taking crime scene photographs where geolocation had evidentiary value, then my concerns might be different.

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